Doba was born in 1946 in Swarzedz, Poland, right after the end of World War II, when the country had been run over by the Soviets and the Germans, then bombed to dust. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. GitHub export from English Wikipedia. That October, he paddled from Senegal to Brazil in 99 days. After a while, the boys began to mutiny. His desire to conquer the sea grew from an innocent idea that gradually consumed him: He had kayaked everything else, so why not the Atlantic Ocean? Dobas apartment building is a five-story cube of blank concrete, with blank concrete stairwells. He wanted to tough out his original plan. UPDATE: The votes are inmore than 521,000 of them, more than ever beforeand we have a winner. Heres why each season begins twice. Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. He was happy to see his friends, team and the warm Welcome of the Bretons. This was not Dobas first transatlantic crossing in OLO. When he gave me a last hug, maybe he didnt cry, but I saw his eyes, Bartek said. One afternoon Doba parked his Mazda 5 minivan in the lot beside his apartment building, pointed to a nearby forest of Scots pines standing rigid and competing for light and said, amused, Sometimes we have the great adventure of going out there to drink a beer.. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. I was infected with a virus.. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. Doba did finally accept help two weeks later. He rode through 30-foot waves. He put on a clean red-and-white shirt, the colors of the Polish flag, and lay down on the grass. Sea kayaks are seaworthy small boats with a covered deck and the ability to incorporate a spray deck.They trade off the manoeuvrability of whitewater kayaks for higher cruising speed, cargo capacity, ease of straight-line paddling, and comfort for long journeys. He was still close to the New Jersey shore, so he landed at Barnegat Bay, ate a steak, slept at a hotel and continued on his way. On the kayak. After Gabriela told me about Christmas, Doba began telling a story. *The official fanpage of Aleksander Doba. Doba accepted his suggestion that he paddle to Bermuda for a repair. In recent years, Mr. Doba enjoyed celebrity status in Poland. At age 64, after 42 years of marriage, she still adores Doba, and her acceptance of him is absolute easier than it used to be, in fact. Every two weeks, he would make another loop. Even in seemingly reasonable conditions, rogue waves can cause havoc. Still, Doba had no reason to plot a trip across the Atlantic . But I was my own little speck in the vast universe. He waited three days and still had no signal, so in hopes of getting Gabriela or Arminski to look into his phone problems, he pressed the help button on his SPOT device, a piece of gear that has become de rigueur among adventurers, as it can send emergency messages and GPS coordinates when a person is far off the grid. One of Earth's loneliest volcanoes holds an extraordinary secret. On the way to my grandmothers house for the holidays, he wanted to be dropped off on a river and asked us to pick him up on the way back. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. He trained by jogging up and down the stairs of a high-rise building with a heavy backpack, and he took long daily hikes. Then, about three weeks into the trip, more storms arrived: Winds up to 55 knots created outsize waves, mountains of water racing toward the kayak, the entire surface of the sea lurching as if a stampede of elephants were running across a giant water bed. It's unique design is compromise between safety during extreme ocean challenge, and feeling that it should be close to spirit of kayaking. Dne 22. nora 2021 zemel ve vku 74 let pi vstupu na Kilimandro polsk dobrodruh Aleksander Olek" Doba, kter byl znm hlavn svmi peplavbami Atlantskho ocenu. He said it because he has reimagined the concept of crisis, just as he has reimagined the concept of suffering. Three times. He also snacked on dried fruit and his wifes plum jam, but he ran out of that halfway across the ocean. But. [4] He quickly started going on kayaking expeditions regularly. His hands and forearms look 30, straight off a Montana roper. Transatlantic crossings are passages of passengers and cargo across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe or Africa and the Americas. 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. He did it three times, setting records and becoming a national hero in Poland. The air that day hovered around 40 degrees about 4 degrees Celsius. An expedition, he told me. In 2010, Doba spent 99 days of the First Transatlantic Kayak Expedition paddling 3,400 nautical miles (3,913 miles) across one of the narrowest points of the Atlantic, between Dakar, Senegal, and Acarau, Brazil. He preferred to be dropped off on a cold river in the middle of the snow.. Adventurer of 2015 ! And a tourist does not prepare himself too much. Polish sea kayaker Aleksander Doba - known for making the transatlantic journey from Europe to North America aboard a kayak - passed away this week. [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. He is a family man, whose positive attitude to life is contagious. Doba started kayaking in 1980, after he and Gabriela moved to Police, where Doba took his equipment-repair job at the chemical factory and Gabriela was a social worker. Dec 20, 2019 - Polish adventurer and kayaker Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic by kayak a few days before turning 71 years old. He hungered to paddle across an ocean so vast it seemed infinite. He didnt particularly want to be rescued, anyway. [2], Doba has also paddled in a kayak with others around the Baltic Sea (in 1999, 80 days, 4227km), from Police to Narvik (in 2000, 101 days, 5369km) and around Lake Baikal (in 2009, 41 days, 2000km). Doba and his wife, Gabriela, at home in Police. 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. What most of us experience as suffering he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. Old cells hang around as we age, doing damage to the body. 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. In 1989, he surpassed the record for the most days paddled by a Polish man in a single year. After, on weekends Doba would put a kayak on a train, debark as close to a river as possible and walk the kayak, on a wheeled contraption built from bicycle and stroller parts, 25 miles if necessary to put in. Their three sons, Dobas uncles, disappeared. On the morning of Feb. 22, he reached Kilimanjaros summit with two guides. 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 in the Atlantic before arriving in Florida in April 2014. 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. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Polish adventurer Aleksander Doba, who completed three solo kayak trips across the Atlantic, has died at the age of 74 during an attempt to scale the highest peak in Africa, his family said on . Previous Story: 8.31.17. I was not sure if they would leave me alive. He was known for his long voyages crossing oceans. He witnessed the formation of storm clouds and the deafening calm that accompanied them. 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. Before the Iron Curtain fell, the Communist Party declared it illegal to kayak on the Baltic Sea, lest anyone defect. The 70-Year-Old Master Kayaker All rights reserved, Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. . Realizing that Olo might momentarily shatter into pieces, he strapped on a harness and scrambled across the deck to tie on a new anchor before crawling back to his nook. A mans world? 02/23/21 AT 12:35 PM. 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. Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. A real katorga, says Doba, who is Polish katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. After 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes at sea, Doba and his . Then he paddled to the French shore. [11] [3], Doba first tried kayaking at age 34 on a trip organised by the company he was working for. 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. The day I arrived in Warsaw, a very chic woman named Martyna Wojciechowska, the host of a Polish documentary TV show called Woman at the End of the World, showed up at my hotel to explain Doba to me. This site is to promote polish paddler Aleksander Doba and his highly respectable . Aleksander "Olek" Doba, a retired engineer from Poland, left Lisbon, Portugal, in his kayak on October 5, 2013. Then the AA batteries for his SPOT personal tracking device failed, and the retired engineer had to rig a new, delicate connection using AAAs. Doba's wizened but muscular frame and ancient, friendly face became familiar not just to the adventure world but to mainstream audiences when he kayaked across the Atlantic in . But after she got the bill for $500, she says, the desire to talk decreased. His pension is $700 a month. Gabriela, she says, was to be honest, a little pissed that Doba was going again. But still, I was so happy Id gotten away. He has no interest in dying in his bed. Trans-Atlantic kayaker Aleksander Doba, 67, was 110 nautical miles southwest of Bermuda on Wednesday [Feb 19], paddling towards the island to affect repairs to the rudder of his kayak. But this voyage was too dangerous, she told me, to keep her head where she liked it to be, stuck in the sand. All rights reserved. A sea kayak or touring kayak is a kayak developed for the sport of paddling on open waters of lakes, bays, and the ocean. 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. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. Doba with Olo, the kayak he used to cross the North Atlantic in 2017. Aleksander doba. Before the second expedition, there were similarly heavy struggles between us. Why wetlands are so critical for life on Earth, Rest in compost? With a long grey beard, a big smile on the face and the looks of a pensioner on holiday, Aleksander Doba didn . He tried to drill holes in the rudder and attach the rudder to the stern with plastic ties. He was pummeled again by wind and waves. Hed been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jerseys Barnegat Bay. Shoot, the devil says. He has kayaked solo across the Atlantic 3 times, most recently in 2017 at the age of 70. . These involved such things as catamarans sailing in from the Bahamas and helicopters dropping rudder-repair gift packages out of the sky. Three weeks later, he reached Florida. Aleksander Doba kayaked the Atlantic EN: I drove from Brussels to Le Conquet (Brest) in France to greet Polish adventurer Alex Doba who finished his 3rd kayak transatlantic in exactly 110 days (16 May - 3 Sept). Her department grew to 100 people from five. Doba had promised himself he would be tougher than all that. However, in general, from my very low point of observation, the ocean looked clean. The design by British civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a . 75 year old adventurer climbed on the highest mountain of Africa and soon after passed away. Then Doba sketched out a design for a new boat that could make the trip. Create Biography . It looks straight out of a dystopian young-adult novel in which the state is intent on creating little gray men. For a while the crossing was drama-free. With this design the paddler sits up off the water as well. Dobas goal was to go continent to continent between the mainlands, from Senegal to Brazil, unsupported. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. 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. El polaco Aleksander Doba, que se convirti en la primera persona en cruzar el ocano Atlntico en kayak y en solitario a los 65 aos de edad, falleci el . What is wind chill, and how does it affect your body? Doba returned to Police to a heros welcome and 14 months later flew to Washington to receive an award from the National Geographic Society as the 2015 Peoples Choice Adventurer of the Year. Unauthorized use is prohibited. This man rowed a fucking houseboat across an ocean, absolutely unreal. (This worked a little, but not entirely.). The next time I visited, my mother-in-law did not prepare that soup. Doba was a little disappointed. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again. Only one person had ever crossed the Atlantic in a kayak using solely muscle power, and he traveled island to island, from Newfoundland to Ireland. Bats and agaves make tequila possibleand theyre both at risk, This empress was the most dangerous woman in Rome. Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. 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. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations to his fathers adventures. His skin looks 71. Raspberry vodka! But then Doba turned his SPOT and his phone back on. Doba had been into hang gliding and sky diving, but the government often closed the airspace because Police was near the East German border. During the trip, he struggled against storms; his rudder was damaged and had to be repaired by sailors from a merchant vessel. He arrived in Tanzania last month. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach. So I thought: Well, he might not come back.. 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. When he arrived in Brazil he weighed 64kg. He kept chasing adventure. The second trip was to raise the bar, Doba says. Doba returned to his cabin somewhat shocked to be alive. Adventure paddler Aleksander Doba willed his 71-year-old body and 1,600-pound kayak through a 4,000-mile trans-Atlantic journey MARCH 22, 2018. (Doba doesnt speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) On Sunday, May 7 2017, Alexander "Olek" Doba, took off from Sandy Hook Bay in New York City in his well-known kayak "OLO". He later spent 100 days paddling the circumference of the Baltic Sea. 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. He was greeted by one journalist and the Polish ambassador. He slept in a tiny coffin-shaped cabin that he entered by sliding through a portal, and when flying fish landed on his deck he snacked on them alive. Dobas response to Gabrielas concern about what hed do in a crisis, if the closest land was the bottom, was to say there will be no crisis. Id been feeling buried, by stuff exactly as predictable as youd imagine for a working mother of two kids. But the community raised money for him, and on Oct. 3, 2013, off he went. Please be respectful of copyright. Eco-friendly burial alternatives, explained. He was named 2014 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. Do you know how fast they go? he said. AD: OLO is 23 feet long and three feet wide and weighs 1,100 pounds, and I used a nine-foot-long kayak paddle. And he began preparing to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, an expedition that had long been on his bucket list. After more than three months of paddling, a Polish adventure junkie has crossed the Atlantic in a 23 foot custom kayak. Still, Doba refused. He is one of two people in the world to kayak across the Atlantic without a sail. 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 phone exploded with hysterical texts from home. Rather, he said, I was infected with a virus.. But this trip felt different. Without the wings, the kayak had greater lateral stability and was less sensitive to wind. Its good?. Still unflappable, Doba, who had never cared for the wings to begin with, removed the remainder of the broken pieces and the navigation light attached to them and used an empty plastic jug and duct tape to reattach the lights to the body of the kayak before waving the sloop away for the final 700 miles of his journey. Doba alerted Chmielinski, who alerted Gabriela who didnt really want to know anything about how the trip was going. The new year once started in Marchhere's why, Jimmy Carter on the greatest challenges of the 21st century, This ancient Greek warship ruled the Mediterranean, How cosmic rays helped find a tunnel in Egypt's Great Pyramid, Who first rode horses? The ships captain didnt think it was a great idea to set this rash-covered, sleep-deprived 70-year-old man back in the ocean alone. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. kontakt: aleksanderdoba@gmail.com Aleksander Doba (9 September 1946 - 22 February 2021) was a Polish kayaker and mountain climber. This time he would paddle from west to east, from New York to Lisbon where he would celebrate his 70th birthday after having spent . An elementary school honored him with a statue in his scruffy, bearded likeness. . 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. However, in Brazil, while running the Amazon in my kayak in 2011, I survived two bouts of rogues with firearms and machetes. In photos from the ends of his trips, he looks ecstatic and feral, in the best possible sense, intrinsically wild and free. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. As he braced for his life, the rope tethering his sea anchor (the only thing keeping his kayak stable) broke off. But Mr. Doba hungered to cross an ocean so vast that it seemed infinite, and he began plotting to kayak the Atlantic. [15][16] He has also jumped 14 times with parachute, piloted gliders for a total of 250 hours, and practiced cycling. An early escapade involved kayaking on the Baltic Sea at a time when the Communist Party, to discourage defectors, had declared it illegal. Aleksander Doba is a Polish traveler and explorer. 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. He was named 2014 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic . Then he sat down and fell asleep.. People ask me how old I am, and I say, I am not old! For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. I did not think I could find myself in something so downing, he texted to Chmielinski, somewhat incomprehensibly, two weeks later. Doba was ready, Chmielinski suspected, to just drift off into the eternal vastness and go down with his ship. So far I dont plan. Then he added: But I do like to sail.. In 1989, he spent 108 days on the . In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across . An ocean crossing is not something to undertake lightly. Without the SPOT, nobody would be able to find the kayak if they needed to rescue him. He had been taking long trips for decades, but he always slept on land. Imagine a plane the size of a kayak hitting turbulence, but in water rather than air; at sea level, water is hundreds of times denser. 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. A National Geographic team has made the first ascent of the remote Mount Michael, looking for a lava lake in the volcanos crater. I wished him luck in reaching the summit, Mr. Wawrzyniak said in a phone interview. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. 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. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. Doba traveled an average of 30 miles a day, often paddling at night, when the temperatures dropped. He went on to win the gold medal at the Open Academic Polish Championships in Whitewater Kayaking in 2003 at age 57 and defended the title the next year. Doba paddled naked. AD: When I was alone on the ocean I had no fear for my life. According to eyewitness reports he felt well the entire journey but after reaching the top asked for a two-minute break before posing for a photo. The most important kayaking trips of Aleksander Doba: 1989 -he broke a record f a distance, swam in a kayak during one calendar year: 5125 km, of which 5000 km were new trails, swam by him for the first time in his life. Chmielinski interpreted this communication blackout as a sign that Doba was deeply despairing, perhaps because he was alone again after being with the crew on Baltic Light, perhaps because, now that he had accepted help, he worried that he would not earn a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for kayaking solo from continent to continent unsupported. sport. 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. This is an order. And the German man jumps. One of the last people to see Mr. Doba alive was a Polish climber named Boguslaw Wawrzyniak, who was also summiting Kilimanjaro that day. "It is with profound regret that we announce the death of the great . The Polish . During the worst of it, the rope on his sea anchor broke. Please upgrade your browser. One day, a colleague of Dobas said the factorys kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. He passed out. 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. Arminski, the boatbuilder, spent many hours trying to argue Doba out of it. . 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. It was raining. Still, Gabriela did not want to be Penelope to Dobas Odysseus. When a few landed on my kayak, I didnt have to eat my lyophilized food for dinner that night.. How many capsizes can you survive?. In 2010, when he kayaked from Senegal to Brazil, his skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, his fingernails nearly peeled off, and his eyes suffered from conjunctivitis. A former chemical plant engineer who lived in a little river town, Mr. Doba had long been the most accomplished kayaker in his country. Subscribe. Water trapped in Olos storage lockers short-circuited the electric desalinator. ' laughs intrepid kayaker Aleksander Doba. 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. Doba drifted around for days eating freeze-dried goulash and chocolate bars. The devil says, It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern. So the Frenchman jumps. Doba began planning it, of course, a few days after he returned from Florida. AD: I'm not going to repeat paddling the Atlantic Ocean, but paddling something else maybe. 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. Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. This is the only one thing you can do.. The kayak OLO was professionally designed and made in Andrzej Arminski shipyard located in Szczecin, Poland . And then, suddenly, the whale went down and disappeared into the ocean.. I was the one who would have to pay! he says. 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 . In video footage of the hour before he left, Doba looks wrecked exhausted and on the verge of tears. [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. Her last article for the magazine was about a Chinese mafia don. ) so that she could compare it with the condition of her children upon their return. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldnt, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. The Daily. 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. Polish adventurer Aleksander "Olek" Doba paddles across the Atlantic by Kayak from Lisbon, Portugal to New Smyrna Beach in Florida:. We watched them in his living room together with Gabriela. 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. Four days later, after capsizing repeatedly, Doba finally cleared the Sandy Hook peninsula and left lower New York Bay. 2013Aleksander Doba67. Dobas maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. At the start of that trip, she weighed 700 kilograms, and she carried (among other things) two carbon-fiber paddles, five spray skirts to cover Dobas body while he paddled, two pairs of kayaking gloves, three pairs of sunglasses, two pairs of reading glasses, 10 boxes of waterproof matches, two big butchers knives, one electric desalinator, two manual desalinators, three floating smoke signals, nine red flares, a cooking stove and propane canisters, two flashlights, two headlamps, an iPad, a GoPro camera, 320 lithium batteries (for Olos satellite signaling devices), mineral supplements, a sewing kit, 175 chocolate bars, three toothbrushes, seven bottles of sunscreen, three liters of homemade wine, a pumice stone for the calluses on his hands, two pairs of sandals and an emergency fishing kit.