And a tourist does not prepare himself too much. He kept no schedule. 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. She threatened divorce. His clothes, permeated with salt, refused to dry. I do not want to be a little gray man. This is a common expression in Poland and a good motto for us all. But then Doba turned his SPOT and his phone back on. Their three sons, Dobas uncles, disappeared. Along with jars of his wifes plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars and homemade wine. Better than sushi.). In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Aleksander Doba is a Polish traveler and explorer. But Mr. Doba insisted, and he became a blip in the ocean all over again. In October 2010, Doba voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean by kayak, from Senegal to Brazil and completed his trip in February 2011. These skeletons may have the answer, Scientists are making advancements in birth controlfor men, Blood cleaning? On the warmer part of the Atlantic Ocean, flying fish were a big, unexpected attraction. Wojciechowska drank a double cappuccino and told me that shed been engaged five times but never married she felt it would be impossible to follow her dreams with a husband. I sense some . (Very fine, he said. Explore. When he docked his kayak at the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. Will he cross the Atlantic again? He kept chasing adventure. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldnt, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. F. Pinterest. This does not feel good.. On it, he has written the names of rivers he has paddled. Then, on Dec. 19, Dobas phone stopped working. kontakt: aleksanderdoba@gmail.com Suffering tends to do more for the flagellant than it does for the flagellants loved ones. 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. His skin was bronzed and weathered, his beard long and tangled, but the 67-year-old's mood was upbeat as he raised his arms in triumph after a remarkable crossing that spanned 5,400 miles. I was not sure if they would leave me alive. But this specific soup I dont like. That was a shock to his mother-in-law, he said, but a short one. 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. Once he was out past the Statue of Liberty, Doba turned on his GPS. 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. He died while climbing Kilimanjaro after reaching the mountain summit. Create Biography . Dobas apartment building is a five-story cube of blank concrete, with blank concrete stairwells. Doba with Mr. Olek, the kayak he uses on rivers locally. Olo is 300 kilograms empty. Then a woman who noticed me coughing approached with a little glass of thick red liquid that looked like cough syrup. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility. The design by British civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a . Aleksander Doba, famous Polish traveler, died on 8th of February during his expedition to Kilimanjaro. After a while, the boys began to mutiny. Arminski, the boatbuilder, spent many hours trying to argue Doba out of it. Aleksander Doba. If you arent willing to suffer, you can do nothing. It is basically an avalanche of water. A former chemical plant engineer who lived in a little river town, Mr. Doba had long been the most accomplished kayaker in his country. I wished him luck in reaching the summit, Mr. Wawrzyniak said in a phone interview. Bright green moss covered the trees, egrets stretched like sheets blowing on a line and the occasional ray of sun broke through the low clouds. The most serious trouble came for Doba when he hit a storm that lasted two days. I was just paddling down the river, he told the border patrol when he inevitably was caught. An elementary school honored him with a statue in his scruffy, bearded likeness. Doba and his wife, Gabriela, at home in Police. Aleksander "Olek" Doba, a retired engineer from Poland, left Lisbon, Portugal, in his kayak on October 5, 2013. Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. Polish adventurer and kayaker Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic by kayak a few days before turning 71 years old. Doba's wizened but muscular frame and ancient, friendly face became familiar not just to the adventure world bu 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. 2 November 2015. Heres why each season begins twice. Polish long distance kayaker Aleksander Doba was planning to set off to attempt an Atlantic Ocean crossing alone at the age of 69 years. When a few landed on my kayak, I didnt have to eat my lyophilized food for dinner that night.. He found a piece of grass to end his trip as to him the . The fact that Doba knows this is clear in his eyes. [18], Doba died while climbing Kilimanjaro on February 22, 2021. Then I asked the local guides with him, Do you know who this man is? And they said: Yes. An ocean crossing is not something to undertake lightly. In truth, my own trip had not been as peaceful as Id hoped. But Doba insisted. Without the SPOT, nobody would be able to find the kayak if they needed to rescue him. It was raining. . 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. I joked with Gabriela that this was her Atlantic. He studied the water closely. Those were very, very hard times for both of us. I dont know how I ended up here.. It's unique design is compromise between safety during extreme ocean challenge, and feeling that it should be close to spirit of kayaking. I did it with no stuntman, Doba told me proudly. 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. By choosing it, he casts himself in the role of hero, not victim. He drank five cups a day of instant coffee. Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based outside Berlin. The majority of His mean speed was 2.26km/h, and he averaged 54km per 24 hours, with a maximum 24hour distance of 126.5km. 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. Then she sat me down at a nearby restaurant, ordered pierogies and borscht and told me a joke. The huge group of his supporters keeps growing . sport. 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. When Doba finally said, I will go on the North Atlantic, I said, I will not participate in this, Arminski told me. He had slept only three hours the night before and had not even had time to double-check all his gear. 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. His first crossing was in 2011, from Senegal, West Africa, to Brazil, a 99-day journey. However, in general, from my very low point of observation, the ocean looked clean. When the ship circled back to him again, Mr. Doba shouted a vulgarity in Polish, and they left for good. [1] In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across the Atlantic. Aleksander Doba Olo . This time Dobas trip was far more successful, which is not to say it was pleasant. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. He preferred to be dropped off on a cold river in the middle of the snow.. Dozens of sharks checked on me, but one was ready to attack me, and I had to whack his head with the paddle really hard to make him leave, Doba remembers. Once Poland became a democracy, social structures and attitudes changed. 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. Before he arrived in France, he made a few GoPro videos. 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.. After clearing Barnegat Bay and heading for the horizon, he was soon a floating blip in the ocean. 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. The whale swam here, and there, all around my kayak. He grew up ice skating on ponds and skiing through forests. Aleksander Doba (born 9 September 1946) is a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. Kind, gracious, enthusiastic Poles kept bringing me shots of alcohol, which I tried to wave off. Doba paddled naked. With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. His kayak,I rowed varsity crew in highschool and got into kayaking and poling in college. Corley, Apr 21, 2014, in forum: All Things Boats & Boating. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. He did explain to her how to boil water, which to this day she finds ridiculous. Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . AD: No, although 40 nights of strenuous effort to break out of the trap of unfavorable winds in the Bermuda Triangle drained me very much. 2013Aleksander Doba67. My flu lingered. 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. Three times, he paddled 200 to 300 miles, only to get pushed back by the winds and currents. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations to his fathers adventures. But so what? But two months into the voyage, almost dead center in the North Atlantic, Dobas satellite phone stopped working, rendering him unable to communicate for 47 days. But this voyage was too dangerous, she told me, to keep her head where she liked it to be, stuck in the sand. If I survive., One unseasonably balmy January morning, Doba, dressed in baggy Gore-Tex pants and rain boots, handed me a blue plastic paddle, waved me into the front of a red double kayak, took out his hearing aids and declared, happily, shoving us off, Now I am in the silent zone. We had gone to a river-veined lowland of central Poland for the 53rd annual International Winter Kayaking Congregation, an event that sounds grand but was really just 60 Polish people, at or past middle age, spending a weekend in January together kayaking, drinking and hanging out at a lodge. AD: OLO is 23 feet long and three feet wide and weighs 1,100 pounds, and I used a nine-foot-long kayak paddle. The Polish native had departed from Lisbon, Portugal, on October 5, 2013, with the intention of paddling 5,400 miles across the Atlantic's widest point and arriving in Florida in mid-February. They offered to throw him ropes. When he arrived in Brazil he weighed 64kg. He arrived in Tanzania last month. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? Doba with the writer on the Brda River in central Poland in January. In the spring of 2017, he began his third trans-Atlantic crossing the one that garnered the most media attention when he paddled out from New Jersey. (See map on left). Actualizado a 24/02/2021 12:40 CET. 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 . F. When he gave me a last hug, maybe he didnt cry, but I saw his eyes, Bartek said. Aleksander Doba has died age 74 on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania on Monday February 22. All rights reserved, Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. He started in Lisbon, Portugal on October 5th, 2013 and the goal was to arrive in Florida sailing 5,400 nautial miles. The Pole has announced that he will set off in May on what will be his third - and possibly toughest - Atlantic Crossing. The first time I visited my future mother-in-law, she served ducks blood soup. Then the devil gets to the Polish man. He tries the reasons he used on the German and French men, without success. Then I saw it: a huge head, sticking out of the ocean, he told Canoe & Kayak magazine in 2014. Bigger than the Atlantic! Doba chimed in. What if we could clean them out? In 2018, a Polish retiree named Aleksander Doba, at 71, completed his third trans-Atlantic solo crossing, in a 21 kayak he designed. He knew that the kayak needed to be unsinkable, as well as self-righting, in the event that it capsized, and that it needed lockers to store food and a cabin in which to sleep. This site is to promote polish paddler Aleksander Doba and his highly respectable . The tool he used to accomplish this was a sea anchor, basically a parachute, secured to the stern of the kayak with a rope, that he set underwater to increase drag. He tried to drill holes in the rudder and attach the rudder to the stern with plastic ties. After Gabriela told me about Christmas, Doba began telling a story. I was infected with a virus.. The key to surviving a serious storm, Doba says, was to keep his kayak oriented with the stern perpendicular to the waves, so that those waves hit the narrow end of the vessel, instead of broadsiding the boat and rolling it over. Without the wings, the kayak had greater lateral stability and was less sensitive to wind. Brent Stirton/Getty Images, for The New York Times, Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times. One day, a colleague of Dobas said the factorys kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. Id never seen him like that. [4] He quickly started going on kayaking expeditions regularly. 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). During the third rescue attempt he yelled a Polish vulgarity. He did not want to be saved, so he waved the Greeks off. 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. "Video: People's Choice Adventurer of the Year Aleksander Doba", "Aleksander Doba Completes His Third Atlantic Crossing in a Kayak", "Police. 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. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. AD: When I was alone on the ocean I had no fear for my life. Raspberry vodka! Scientists just confirmed a 30-foot void first detected inside the monument years ago. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean. He didnt particularly want to be rescued, anyway. 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. He refused. The Olo, Doba's 2010 kayak. Nie chce byc malym szarym czlowiekiem, he told me. After another storm, Olos rudder was seriously damaged, so he reluctantly contacted his team via satellite phone seeking help. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Agence France-Presse Getty Images, Mr. Doba once said that his hunger to cross the Atlantic was not really his idea. He is paddling for New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 4,700 nautical miles away. The first time Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba tried to paddle across the Atlantic Ocean in 2007, he didn't get far. His maternal grandmother was sent to Siberia. He was 74. A documentary about the life of Aleksander Doba entitled Happy Olo was released in 2017. Still, Gabriela did not want to be Penelope to Dobas Odysseus. After he graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, Doba met Gabriela Stucka, his future wife, on a backpacking trip. 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. Directories Newly added. Replies: 5 Views: 2,045. . After more than three months of paddling, a Polish adventure junkie has crossed the Atlantic in a 23 foot custom kayak. A storm had damaged his rudder. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. 1,277 talking about this. Shoot, the devil says. Doba wasnt on a schedule. 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 . A week later, three bandits went through my stuff for half an hour. 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. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. All the big muscles in the body are useless. Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. A National Geographic team has made the first ascent of the remote Mount Michael, looking for a lava lake in the volcanos crater. Still, the trip was perfect. [2] But Mr. Doba had tested the limits of possibility during his two previous Atlantic crossings. Aleksander Doba in the Atlantic before arriving in Florida in April 2014. Aleksander doba. . 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. He designed an unsinkable kayak that contained food lockers and a cabin to sleep in. UPDATE: The votes are inmore than 521,000 of them, more than ever beforeand we have a winner. I consider myself to be a tourist, he explains. He then sat down on a rock and "just fell asleep".[19]. I was just paddling down the river, he explained. [15][16] He has also jumped 14 times with parachute, piloted gliders for a total of 250 hours, and practiced cycling. It should be noted that he accomplished it using only weekends and normal, 26-day leave. "Na szczycie Olek poprosi o 2 minuty przerwy, usiad na kamieniu i po prostu zasn", "Kayaker, 64, completes marathon paddle across Atlantic", "Landfall: Aleksander Doba reaches South America", "Kajakarstwo - Aleksander Doba przepyn Atlantyk", Unofficial blog for Aleksander Doba Transatlantic Kayak Crossing, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aleksander_Doba&oldid=1104141716, Recipients of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 13 August 2022, at 00:00. Transatlantic passenger crossings became faster, safer, and more reliable with the advent of steamships in the 19th century. His feats made him a national hero in Poland.