Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. Suffering tends to do more for the flagellant than it does for the flagellants loved ones. I did it with no stuntman, Doba told me proudly. Adventurer of 2015 ! Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. I paddle when I would like. His skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, including blisters in his armpits and groin. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldnt, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. The more you dont believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. There were spiders. Rowers whove paddled the Atlantic an easier proposition because rowing allows a person to recruit leg and back muscles have strapped themselves to the floors of their cabins to avoid being bounced around during storms and concussed, or worse. After clearing Barnegat Bay and heading for the horizon, he was soon a floating blip in the ocean. Reviews, News & Stories Paddling Buyer's Guide Paddling Trip Guide. He kept no schedule. On the warmer part of the Atlantic Ocean, flying fish were a big, unexpected attraction. When he arrived in Brazil he weighed 64kg. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Szczecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht-builder named Andrzej Arminski. Directories Newly added. 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. Event producers asked him to just walk onstage and say, in English, Thank you very much. Doba, who wore jeans to the June ceremony, walked onstage and said, Polacy nie gesi i swoj jezyk maja. Polish people are not geese and have their own language. In the early 1970s, Mr. Doba graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. When Mr. Doba encountered border patrol soldiers, they told him that he was in serious breach of the law. Adventure paddler Aleksander Doba willed his 71-year-old body and 1,600-pound kayak through a 4,000-mile trans-Atlantic journey Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach. 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 and his wife, Gabriela, at home in Police. Log In Once logged in, you can add biography in the database. Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . 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. Recently, just before his 71 st birthday, he sailed single-handed across the Atlantic for the third time in his kayak. My decision to continue didnt take longer than a few seconds.. He had been taking long trips for decades, but he always slept on land. Bigger than the Atlantic! Doba chimed in. Doba wasnt on a schedule. 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). . Doba with Mr. Olek, the kayak he uses on rivers locally. [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. When Doba finally said, I will go on the North Atlantic, I said, I will not participate in this, Arminski told me. This was his second crossing, and he estimates that, due to his drift in currents, he paddled some 7,000 miles - this from a 67 year old man sporting a long, grey beard. He grew up ice skating on ponds and skiing through forests. He rode through 30-foot waves. The Olo, Doba's 2010 kayak. She is also co-author of The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, which will be published next month. He witnessed the formation of storm clouds and the deafening calm that accompanied them. It didnt work. 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. What most of us experience as suffering he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. Previous generations had not fared better. In truth, my own trip had not been as peaceful as Id hoped. These involved such things as catamarans sailing in from the Bahamas and helicopters dropping rudder-repair gift packages out of the sky. During his voyages he admired the majesty of the sea and relished wonders that he alone was privy to. To go into the sea and die that would be a problem for my family and a problem for Andrzej Arminski, too, Doba acknowledged. F. Pinterest. 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. Doba being helped by the crew of Baltic Light in June 2017, when he had rudder problems during his North Atlantic crossing. He preferred to be dropped off on a cold river in the middle of the snow.. Doba had promised himself he would be tougher than all that. He gives himself control. We know who this is. 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. Transatlantic passenger crossings became faster, safer, and more reliable with the advent of steamships in the 19th century. Aleksander Doba spent 110 days alone at sea. 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 this specific soup I dont like. That was a shock to his mother-in-law, he said, but a short one. His feats made him a national hero in Poland. Without the wings, the kayak had greater lateral stability and was less sensitive to wind. I was the one who would have to pay! he says. Doba maintains that his need to cross the Atlantic in a kayak did not originate within him. It was accomplished in a 7-meter sea kayak and set a record for the longest open-water crossing ever undertaken by a kayaker, at roughly 99 days (the previous longest kayak crossing belonged to Peter Bray who traveled from Newfoundland to Ireland in 2001 and took over 76 days, relying on muscle-power only and no sail). 2013Aleksander Doba67. Through the ocean. Then I saw it: a huge head, sticking out of the ocean, he told Canoe & Kayak magazine in 2014. (Doba doesnt speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) 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.) Phone, bad. He gave the thumbs down. Every three weeks there is a storm with waves that can capsize the kayak. 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. 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. The Polish . But by katorga, Doba does not mean an activity he does not wish to do. He had always planned to go on three crossings: South, Mid- and North Atlantic. He studied the water closely. When the ship circled back to him again, Mr. Doba shouted a vulgarity in Polish, and they left for good. In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across . A week later, three bandits went through my stuff for half an hour. [7][8] He was 65 years old when he undertook this journey. Yet, at least for me, the river was magic calm, mysterious and alive. The risk of kayaking the North Atlantic, Arminski believed, was irresponsibly, even amorally high. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. Sadly, he passed away this week while climbing Kilimanjaro. When he saw shooting stars at night, he made wishes that, he said, later came true. I am Polish. MARCH 22, 2018. *The official fanpage of Aleksander Doba. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. 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.. Rather, he said, I was infected with a virus.. An expedition, he told me. Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based outside Berlin. During the third rescue attempt he yelled a Polish vulgarity. F. But. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. Doba was a little disappointed. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. This would have been Doba's third transatlantic crossing. 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. She threatened divorce. In mid-September 2013, Doba still did not possess all the gear he wanted to take on his trip. 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. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Her last article for the magazine was about a Chinese mafia don. Mr. Dobas three daring voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, and in 2017 he became the oldest person to kayak across the Atlantic. She felt bad about it, she said, and she felt judged, but here we were, werent we? We watched them in his living room together with Gabriela. He was 74. He then reached Acara at 17:50 local time (99 days, 6 h, 20 min). He did it three times, setting records and becoming a national hero in Poland. A mans world? Doba did finally accept help two weeks later. Doba had been into hang gliding and sky diving, but the government often closed the airspace because Police was near the East German border. On the morning of Feb. 22, he reached Kilimanjaros summit with two guides. People stopped him on the street to take selfies. A storm had damaged his rudder. His mean speed was 2.26km/h, and he averaged 54km per 24 hours, with a maximum 24hour distance of 126.5km. Every two weeks, he would make another loop. 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. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations to his fathers adventures. Then Doba cut the bent portion off the pin with a hacksaw blade hed brought along and jury-rigged a way to control the rudder with carabiners. AD: When I packed things carefully and ate some food, I could lie down on my back.