For Aleksander Doba, pitting himself against the wide-open sea storms, sunstroke, monotony, hunger and loneliness is a way to feel alive in old age. So, Gabriela told me, she laid out for her husband all the reasons trans-Atlantic kayaking was stupid. ) so that she could compare it with the condition of her children upon their return. On the warmer part of the Atlantic Ocean, flying fish were a big, unexpected attraction. The whole nation was starving. During the expedition storms threw him off course and he had to sail 1,300 additional nautical miles to . NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. My decision to continue didnt take longer than a few seconds.. The Polish adventurer was world-famous for his oceanic kayak voyages. According to multiple Polish media reports . "It is with profound regret that we announce the death of the great . ' laughs intrepid kayaker Aleksander Doba. [11] Aleksander Doba in the Atlantic before arriving in Florida in April 2014. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. He was named 2014 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic . Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . When he was too far from shore to see any birds, Doba was surrounded instead by marine wildlife, from fish and dolphins to turtles, whales, and sharks. After breaking off those wings, it took me only a few seconds to adjust and start to enjoy such an unexpected improvement of my kayak, says Doba. People ask me how old I am, and I say, I am not old! Shoot, the devil says. He died while climbing Kilimanjaro after reaching the mountain summit. Then, on Dec. 19, Dobas phone stopped working. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again. When Doba finally said, I will go on the North Atlantic, I said, I will not participate in this, Arminski told me. But she was charmed by his impish streak his stories of smuggling ski boots back from East Germany by walking across the border in them; the beard he grew over a summer holiday, so he could return to university and his mandatory military training as the only soldier in Poland with facial hair. Nonetheless, Gabriela was not prepared for Dobas first trans-Atlantic expedition. AD: I'm not going to repeat paddling the Atlantic Ocean, but paddling something else maybe. He texted via satellite phone with his family and Arminski, the boat builder, who once again served as trip navigator, sending wind and weather reports. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. Finally, the kayaks rudder snapped in the storm, and, unable to battle against the trade winds with a broken rudder, Doba was forced to retreat to Bermuda to have his boat repaired. He didnt particularly want to be rescued, anyway. Previous generations had not fared better. He told me that he took his father to the airport for his most recent crossing. Around noon, we pulled onto a riverbank along with the rest of the group to toast sausages and bread over a fire and eat little cookies shaped like croissants. He lost 14kg in 14 weeks of the journey. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Thus, most likely assuming that Doba was deranged he was, after all, a tiny speck bobbing in a vast universe of water the ship turned around and tried to rescue him again. A real katorga, says Doba, who is Polish katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. After four months at sea, Polish adventure kayaker Aleksander Doba has arrived in Bermuda where he will make repairs to his broken rudder before continuing o. He has no interest in dying in his bed. When he encountered Mr. Doba at 18,700 feet, he was excited to encounter one of his homelands heroes, and he took a selfie with him on the mountain. Aleksander Doba (9 September 1946 - 22 February 2021) was a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans.In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. A freighter picked him up, and its Filipino crew repaired the rudder. He is paddling for New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 4,700 nautical miles away. He wanted to tough out his original plan. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired engineer with a thick white beard and a piercing gaze, was a popular figure in Poland. He communed with the turtles, whose shells he tapped while they swam alongside him to make sure they were alive, and the birds, who landed on Olo for a rest and often entered his cabin and did not want to leave. His kayak,I rowed varsity crew in highschool and got into kayaking and poling in college. Aleksander Doba decided to kayak across the Atlantic three times between the ages of 63 and 71 because he didn't want to be "a little gray man". Today, listen to the story of one man who chose to paddle toward the existential crisis that is life, crossing the Atlantic alone in a kayak. I have two sons and two granddaughters. He was, by then, 90 percent of the way across the ocean but had spent the last six weeks paddling in circles in the Bermuda Triangle, trapped by wind and currents. Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. When he couldnt sleep, because of the unrelenting stuffiness of his cabin and the waves crashing through the portal onto his head, Doba thought about his wife, children and his young granddaughter. His body appears to be assembled from parts belonging to people of vastly different ages. He was famous for his long voyages crossing oceans and seas. Gabriela, she says, was to be honest, a little pissed that Doba was going again. AD: When I packed things carefully and ate some food, I could lie down on my back. Doba drifted around for days eating freeze-dried goulash and chocolate bars. Doba was ready, Chmielinski suspected, to just drift off into the eternal vastness and go down with his ship. My attempt to get out of this terrible conflict was a signal strike. Doba then turned off all his communications, including his SPOT device, which uploaded his coordinates every 10 minutes. Gabriela did not believe he would. Then he sat down and fell asleep.. He put on a clean red-and-white shirt, the colors of the Polish flag, and lay down on the grass. Long COVID patients turn to unproven treatments, Why evenings can be harder on people with dementia, This disease often goes under-diagnosedunless youre white, This sacred site could be Georgias first national park, See glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in Brazils other rainforest, 9 things to know about Holi, Indias most colorful festival, Anyone can discover a fossil on this beach. By ELIZABETH WEIL I did it with no stuntman, Doba told me proudly. The 69-year old paddler who gained recognition as a Nat Geo Adventurer of the Year back in 2015 for his 7716 mile (12,417 km) crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, is getting ready to do it all over again. It didnt work. In addition to Czeslaw, Mr. Doba is survived by his wife; another son, Bartek; a sister, Wanda Kedzia; and three grandchildren. It was like my wishes came true. During his voyages he admired the majesty of the sea and relished wonders that he alone was privy to. Directories Newly added. He thought about his dead parents. On it, he has written the names of rivers he has paddled. Here, Fiann Paul from the Ocean Rowing Society International remembers this most accomplished of adventurers. Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based outside Berlin. Dobas stinking foam sleeping pad and other gear from Olo remain, at Gabrielas request, all these months later, on the balcony. Doba flew back to Poland; returned to his hometown, Police, in the countrys northwest, where he had been managing maintenance and repairs at an enormous chemical factory; and swore off kayaking with a partner ever again. Id never seen him like that. Yet, at least for me, the river was magic calm, mysterious and alive. 75 year old adventurer climbed on the highest mountain of Africa and soon after passed away. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach. One of Earth's loneliest volcanoes holds an extraordinary secret. Doba had only wanted his phone repaired. But storms and equipment failure threw Doba off course, tacking an additional 1,300 miles and two months onto a journey that already would have broken the record for the longest ever solo kayaking voyage. 02/23/21 AT 12:35 PM. Doba did anyway. Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba begins his translatlantic kayak adventure from New York to Lisbon on May 29, 2016 in New York. sport. This was not Dobas first transatlantic crossing in OLO. The idea was to do the crossing unsupported. We watched them in his living room together with Gabriela. F. Pinterest. He is the king of the ocean., Aleksander Doba, Who Kayaked Across the Atlantic, Dies at 74, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/world/europe/aleksander-doba-dead.html. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. At the age of 70, Aleksander Doba became a legend with the kayak. (Very fine, he said. [4] He studied mechanical engineering at Poznan University of Technology and worked in a chemical factory most of his life. Then a woman who noticed me coughing approached with a little glass of thick red liquid that looked like cough syrup. By choosing it, he casts himself in the role of hero, not victim. Its 20-meter-long tail was wagging. He wasnt a man who necessarily looked forward to spending Christmas with the family, his son Czeslaw said. MARCH 22, 2018. Behind me, steering us among the 60 other kayakers and dozens of fallen trees, Doba fidgeted in his seat, like an ADHD kid in class. On April 19 at 4:18 PM, Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba, 67, became the first person to paddle across the Atlantic Ocean at its widest point - 5,400 . A documentary about the life of Aleksander Doba entitled Happy Olo was released in 2017. It was also the great luck caused by the determination of many enthusiastic people that the vessel ready to change her course and hurry to provide assistance to 70-years-young Aleksander Doba, who is on his Third Transatlantic Kayak Journey from New Jersey in the USA to Lisbon in Portugal. National Geographic . Medicine! she said. They are falling, falling a catastrophe is about to happen. He slept no more than six hours a day in multiple installments, crammed into his cockpit on his side among five months' worth of food and equipment. In three weeks, Ill be 71, he says in one. The Daily. Adventure paddler Aleksander Doba willed his 71-year-old body and 1,600-pound kayak through a 4,000-mile trans-Atlantic journey I am only 67 years young! And he began preparing to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, an expedition that had long been on his bucket list. Replies: 5 Views: 2,045. . The primary challenge is not physical. Contribute to chinapedia/wikipedia.en development by creating an account on GitHub. Better than sushi.). When Aleksander Doba kayaked into the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he had just completed his third and by far most dangerous solo trans-Atlantic kayak trip. The majority of End of the expedition So the devil says to the German man: You must jump. He was known for his long voyages crossing oceans. Doba began planning it, of course, a few days after he returned from Florida. He arrived at New Smyrna Beach, Florida on April 19, 2014. On April 19, 2014, Doba, who is now 68, paddled the final stroke of his 7,716-mile transatlantic journey, docking OLO, his 23-foot kayak, in a marina in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Her department grew to 100 people from five. (See map on left). He did have a satellite phone, and he texted with Arminski, who, as his trip navigator, sent a regular forecast for wind and weather. Unloading OLO from the sloop that returned Doba back to the exact spot where he had been forced off course, the kayak's so-called wings, designed to act as roll bars to keep the vessel upright, broke. The World's Greatest Hitchhiker [7][8] He was 65 years old when he undertook this journey. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Doba returned to his cabin somewhat shocked to be alive. So I thought: Well, he might not come back.. [10], After resting there, he initially planned to paddle another 6,000 kilometers north along the shorelines of the Americas to Washington, D.C.[12] However, he eventually decided to transport his transatlantic kayak to Peru instead and embarked on a journey down the Amazon River but after being attacked and robbed twice in Brazil he had to quit. Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. (That didnt work.) His 12,417 kilometer journey began in Lisbon on October 5, 2013 and ended in Florida on April 17, 2014. He then sat down on a rock and "just fell asleep".[19]. [5][6], Doba's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was from Senegal to Brazil in 2010 and spanned 5394 kilometers. The biggest piece of junk floating in the water was a shattered, plastic 200-liter trash barrel. Absolutely no. While it was not the first transatlantic kayak crossing in history, Doba was the first one to travel this way from continent to continent and not island to island. This is a matter of the size and energy of the wave compared to the mass of the kayak. Beyond the boat rolling over, there is an even more catastrophic problem: A breaking wave transfers all the potential energy in the waves height into turbulent, violent kinetic energy. Dobas sleeping cabin, which he reaches by sliding himself through a portal the size of a laptop, affords him, when hes lying down, 15 inches of headroom. Four days later, after capsizing repeatedly, Doba finally cleared the Sandy Hook peninsula and left lower New York Bay. But even if I did, censorship would not let it go., After a storm on June 16, 2017, Doba emerged from his cabin to find that the large pin that attached Olos rudder to the stern was seriously bent. Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. He died like an adventurer after . His skin looks 71. MARCH 22, 2018. In 1989, he surpassed the record for the most days paddled by a Polish man in a single year. Trans Atlantic kayak completed by Aleksander Doba. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. I dont know how I ended up here. The soldiers told Doba he had broken so many laws that they didnt know how to charge him. It is impossible to design a kayak that wont capsize on the North Atlantic, Arminski told me in his British-accented English, sitting behind his desk in Szczecin in a tidy V-neck sweater and a pressed shirt. In truth, my own trip had not been as peaceful as Id hoped. Original resource from explorersweb.comThe wild-bearded Polish super-kayaker Aleksander Doba died as he lived, in pursuit of adventure, passing away on the very summit of Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 74. Sometimes he took his young sons, Bartek and Czesiek, born in 1979 and 1982. Three times, he paddled 200 to 300 miles, only to get pushed back by the winds and currents. Kind, gracious, enthusiastic Poles kept bringing me shots of alcohol, which I tried to wave off. The first time I visited my future mother-in-law, she served ducks blood soup. This does not feel good.. Doba tried to heat the pin with his camping stove and smash it straight. A normal person wants to sit by the fire with their family for Christmas, his son added. The second trip was to raise the bar, Doba says. It started with a small diatribe on the tyranny of politeness that dictates a houseguest must always say he likes everything his host serves him and the problem that results: Youre fed food you dont like again and again. Aleksander Doba, a 64-year-old native of Poland, took off from Dakar, capital of the west African nation of Senegal, back on Oct. 26. The brain is removed from the process. Alone at sea without his hearing aids, Doba joked, he grew so disoriented that he started shouting at himself so that I could hear. (Doba is fairly deaf but didnt bring the aids along because theyre expensive and not waterproof, and there was no one to talk to anyway.) Every two weeks, he would make another loop. I never expected it would be so big, she said. Doba with the writer on the Brda River in central Poland in January. Rather, he said, I was infected with a virus.. In 2018, a Polish retiree named Aleksander Doba, at 71, completed his third trans-Atlantic solo crossing, in a 21 kayak he designed. No one had ever kayaked across open water for this many miles before his journey. Doba declined the ropes the crew offered to throw him. He spent 100 days paddling the circumference of the Baltic Sea. I dont like it at all. Before the second expedition, there were similarly heavy struggles between us. Doba had been into hang gliding and sky diving, but the government often closed the airspace because Police was near the East German border. He did explain to her how to boil water, which to this day she finds ridiculous. He paddled the length of the river in the mid-1980s not 1980 and it was after he moved to the United States, not before. Polish adventurer Aleksander "Olek" Doba paddles across the Atlantic by Kayak from Lisbon, Portugal to New Smyrna Beach in Florida:. He said it because he has reimagined the concept of crisis, just as he has reimagined the concept of suffering. Water trapped in Olos storage lockers short-circuited the electric desalinator. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. If . The next time I visited, my mother-in-law did not prepare that soup. What is wind chill, and how does it affect your body? The devil, a German man, a Frenchman and a Polish man are all in a hot-air balloon, Wojciechowska said. An early escapade involved kayaking on the Baltic Sea at a time when the Communist Party, to discourage defectors, had declared it illegal. Gabrielas accommodations to Dobas lifestyle started in the late 1980s, when Doba became obsessed with kayaking and began insisting that Gabriela drop him and his kayak by the side of the road on the way to her mothers house for Christmas, and then pick up him and his kayak at a prearranged point on her way back home after a few days. My flu lingered. He was 74. He passed out. He crossed the ocean three different times in one of these and spent several months completely alone. The first time Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba tried to paddle across the Atlantic Ocean in 2007, he didn't get far. The triumph of Aleksander Doba. After Gabriela told me about Christmas, Doba began telling a story. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Szczecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht-builder named Andrzej Arminski. The kayak would break into many pieces. So, wearing only his harness, Doba exited the cabin, crawled across the bucking deck with a spare sea anchor attached to a rope, tied the rope to his kayak and threw the anchor off the stern. With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. His maternal grandmother was sent to Siberia. Then shed leave. A sea kayak or touring kayak is a kayak developed for the sport of paddling on open waters of lakes, bays, and the ocean. He was a few . During the third rescue attempt he yelled a Polish vulgarity. Transatlantic passenger crossings became faster, safer, and more reliable with the advent of steamships in the 19th century. Please be respectful of copyright. But Mr. Doba had tested the limits of possibility during his two previous Atlantic crossings. Then I saw it: a huge head, sticking out of the ocean, he told Canoe & Kayak magazine in 2014. Doba wasnt on a schedule. On April 19, 2014, Doba, who is now 68, paddled the final stroke of his 7,716-mile transatlantic journey, docking OLO, his 23-foot kayak, in a marina in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Doba with Olo, the kayak he used to cross the North Atlantic in 2017. To be precise: I was a Jew with the flu about to go kayaking in Poland in January not a setup likely to end well. Aleksander doba. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. He did not want to be saved, so he waved the Greeks off. After 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes at sea, Doba and his . His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. A breaking wave can do whatever it wants to a kayak. There was no engineering Olo for this. A Polish grandfather on Sunday completed his third solo trans-Atlantic kayak crossing, arriving on the French coast 111 days after dipping his paddle into the waters off the US state of New Jersey. Doba being helped by the crew of Baltic Light in June 2017, when he had rudder problems during his North Atlantic crossing. Sean Dudley. Aleksander Doba, a Polish adventurer who kayaked alone across the Atlantic at the age of 70 while subsisting on his wifes fortifying plum jam after having twice paddled solo across the Atlantic when he was in his 60s died on Feb. 22 on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. He found a piece of grass to end his trip as to him the . At 15, Doba rode around Poland by himself. The trip could have ended five days earlier, but he had promised himself when he left New Jersey that he wouldn't just kayak to Europe, but to the Continent proper. Doba in Lisbon in October 2013, demonstrating how he would live aboard his kayak. People stopped him on the street to take selfies. He did it three times, setting records and becoming a national hero in Poland. It felt good. Polish Kayaker Is Paddling Across the Atlantic for the Third Time 69-year-old Aleksander Doba left New York on Sunday in a kayak bound for Portugal. I was infected with a virus.. Doba describes the tedium as a form of dementia: Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of repetitions. He was named 2015 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. Or the afternoon, a week later, on that same river, when he succumbed to the temptation of eating pancakes, tomato soup and rice at the Milk Bar restaurant when he should have been at his campsite, by his kayak, eating cold canned goulash in order to condition his body for arctic temperatures. The fabric smelled horrendous and aggravated his skin, so he abandoned clothes. Will he cross the Atlantic again? The next day, hearing aids restored, Doba drove us to Police, and a few days later, he addressed a question that had been nagging at me: Why did he go on that third trip? After more than three months of paddling, a Polish adventure junkie has crossed the Atlantic in a 23 foot custom kayak. [13], On October 5, 2013, at age 67, he departed from Lisbon (Portugal) for a second transatlantic voyage, with the intention of paddling 5,400 miles across the Atlantic's widest point. It looks straight out of a dystopian young-adult novel in which the state is intent on creating little gray men. He started in Lisbon, Portugal on October 5th, 2013 and the goal was to arrive in Florida sailing 5,400 nautial miles. Aboard Baltic Light, he ate a hot meal and took a bunch of selfies with the Filipino crew. Once he was out past the Statue of Liberty, Doba turned on his GPS. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. Hed been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jerseys Barnegat Bay. When the ship circled back to him again, Mr. Doba shouted a vulgarity in Polish, and they left for good. His feats made him a national hero in Poland. Three years later in 2013 he crossed the . So he stayed on the water nearly another week, in the one-meter-wide boat where hed endured towering waves, in the coffinlike cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved ones patience in order to be lonely, naked and afraid. But the inside of the apartment feels much better: shoes in the entrance hall; pencil marks of grandchildrens heights in the kitchen door jamb; atlases, kayaking trophies and snow globes of family photos in the living room. Anyone can read what you share. The voyage took him 196 days to complete, and he paddled 6,300 miles. Neither Gabriela nor Bartek took him to the airport. The Polish .