But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. I am generally physically active, ride a bike, work in my garden, and enjoy walking.. Nie chce byc malym szarym czlowiekiem, he told me. 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. Not according to biology or history. Arminski agreed to build the boat, and in spring of 2010, Olo, as Doba named his kayak after his own nickname, Olek was complete. Suffering tends to do more for the flagellant than it does for the flagellants loved ones. 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. Near his house, he said, there was a pond, behind the pond was a forest, in the forest there were mushrooms and behind all that was a small airport with gliders and storks, which migrated there for the summer. I read a post on Men's Journal from 2014 that recounts Doba's paddle across the Atlantic from Portugal to Florida. During a storm, the water below the oceans surface stays relatively still; what moves radically are the waves. found: Ocean to piku, 2018: page 4 of cover (Aleksander Doba; in 2010 became first person in the world to cross the Atlantic Ocean by kayak) found : Wikipedia, viewed Oct. 25, 2019 (Aleksander Doba; born Sept. 9, 1946, in Swarzdz; Polish kayaker known for his ocean-crossing voyages; lives in Police near Szczecin, Poland) The weather report was bad, but Chmielinski had arranged for a lot of press, and an entourage of kayakers had come to paddle out with Doba a ways, and he felt he had a duty to them. sport. Then the AA batteries for his SPOT personal tracking device failed, and the retired engineer had to rig a new, delicate connection using AAAs. Aleksander Doba is a Polish traveler and explorer. 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. Its 20-meter-long tail was wagging. UPDATE: The votes are inmore than 521,000 of them, more than ever beforeand we have a winner. So far I dont plan. Then he added: But I do like to sail.. For a while, once again, on this second expedition, all was smooth. Once Poland became a democracy, social structures and attitudes changed. Then shed leave. He was named 2014 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic . Alexander Doba returns to the Atlantic. Old cells hang around as we age, doing damage to the body. Aleksander Ludwik Doba was born on Sept. 9, 1946, in Swarzedz, Poland. I never expected it would be so big, she said. 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. [20] In 2019 he participated in the Polish version of "The Mole" (Agent Gwiazdy), he was eliminated in the 3rd episode and came in 11th. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. He had always planned to go on three crossings: South, Mid- and North Atlantic. ' laughs intrepid kayaker Aleksander Doba. 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 was in a pickle! To avoid the nightmare of quiet conformity, Doba told me he said to his mother-in-law, This is a good soup! I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. Home. He texted Arminski and Piotr Chmielinski, a Polish kayaker who in the mid-1980s, shortly after hed defected to the United States, was part of the first team to paddle the length of the Amazon. Aleksander Doba: On both routes, I saw floating garbage close to the coasts of Africa and Europe. 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. All rights reserved. Gabriela, she says, was to be honest, a little pissed that Doba was going again. The triumph of Aleksander Doba. Three weeks later, he reached Florida. Nae redakce mla tu est udlat s Olekem rozhovor v roce 2015, kdy zskal ocenn Dobrodruh roku od National Geographic a kdy ml za sebou teprve dv peplavby Atlantiku. If a breaking wave hit Olo with no sea anchor, Doba said, I knew I would roll over many times. Hed been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jerseys Barnegat Bay. They offered to throw him ropes. Watch. He is currently working on two books, Home Works and Cuba. He last shot a smoke sauna in Estonia for the magazine.Correction: March 23, 2018 An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Piotr Chmielinskis navigation of the Amazon. Doba began planning it, of course, a few days after he returned from Florida. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Agence France-Presse Getty Images, Mr. Doba once said that his hunger to cross the Atlantic was not really his idea. In three weeks, Ill be 71, he says in one. With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. Doba didnt begin kayaking until the age of 34 and didnt train physically for the journey. He is a family man, whose positive attitude to life is contagious. Today. When a few landed on my kayak, I didnt have to eat my lyophilized food for dinner that night.. 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 was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. 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. He has made his own bargain with the human condition. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach. He arrived at New Smyrna Beach, Florida on April 19, 2014. On February 22, Aleksander Doba made the last few strides to the top of Kilimanjaro, a pleased 74-year-old man, waving to fellow climbers with his envy-inducing muscular arms, a smile beaming from behind the curls of a wild beard. At 15, Doba rode around Poland by himself. The World's Greatest Hitchhiker Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. Adventurer of 2015 ! Doba was ready, Chmielinski suspected, to just drift off into the eternal vastness and go down with his ship. The Polish adventurer was world-famous for his oceanic kayak voyages. 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. [4] He studied mechanical engineering at Poznan University of Technology and worked in a chemical factory most of his life. Contribute to chinapedia/wikipedia.en development by creating an account on GitHub. Even in seemingly reasonable conditions, rogue waves can cause havoc. 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. [15], Aleksander Doba was born 9 September 1946 in Swarzdz, near Pozna, Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland and lived in Police near Szczecin, West Pomeranian Voivodeship. When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? The Pole has announced that he will set off in May on what will be his third - and possibly toughest - Atlantic Crossing. Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba begins his translatlantic kayak adventure from New York to Lisbon on May 29, 2016 in New York. He talks about his amazing adventures with passion and energy. When does spring start? Olo is 300 kilograms empty. Before the second expedition, there were similarly heavy struggles between us. The 70-Year-Old Master Kayaker Their three sons, Dobas uncles, disappeared. Doba did anyway. 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. However, in Brazil, while running the Amazon in my kayak in 2011, I survived two bouts of rogues with firearms and machetes. Doba was a little disappointed. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. A documentary about the life of Aleksander Doba entitled Happy Olo was released in 2017. 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. Then, on Dec. 19, Dobas phone stopped working. Gabriela did not believe he would. A former chemical plant engineer who lived in a little river town, Mr. Doba had long been the most accomplished kayaker in his country. He crossed the ocean three different times in one of these and spent several months completely alone. He was 74. Someone had forgotten to fund the prepaid credit card that covered the bill. The Polish . Previous Story: 8.31.17. It looks good, it smells good, probably everybody likes it. 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. While the distance does not compare with the record for the longest ocean-crossing by kayak, held by Poland's Aleksander Doba for a 6558-kilometre journey from Portugal to Florida via Bermuda, the Tasman Sea is notorious for its unpredictable, difficult weather conditions. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. The first person in the world to paddle from Europe to America in a kayak across the Atlantic Ocean's widest point, Aleksander Doba also holds the record for the number of days (142) spent in a kayak in the ocean. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. 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. A Record-Breaking Atlantic Crossing by Kayak. Before the Iron Curtain fell, the Communist Party declared it illegal to kayak on the Baltic Sea, lest anyone defect. He was known for his long voyages crossing oceans. He didnt particularly want to be rescued, anyway. 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. Three years later in 2013 he crossed the . She felt bad about it, she said, and she felt judged, but here we were, werent we? An expedition, he told me. Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland. He lost 45 pounds. Ninety-nine days after leaving Senegal, Doba arrived in Brazil. Among Dobas bigger regrets in life are the times when he has succumbed, when he has perceived and reacted to suffering in conventional ways for instance, the night in April 1989 when he built a fire in order to make tea and dry his clothes while paddling on the Vistula River near the city of Plock, in central Poland. The whale swam here, and there, all around my kayak. But Mr. Doba had tested the limits of possibility during his two previous Atlantic crossings. He lost 14kg in 14 weeks of the journey. Aleksander Doba was the most accomplished trans-oceanic solo kayaker in the world, who continued setting records into his seventies. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired . After a while, the boys began to mutiny. Reviews, News & Stories Paddling Buyer's Guide Paddling Trip Guide. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. The risk of kayaking the North Atlantic, Arminski believed, was irresponsibly, even amorally high. The kayak OLO was professionally designed and made in Andrzej Arminski shipyard located in Szczecin, Poland . 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. Chmielinski and others came up with what Doba describes as exotic and expensive methods of rescue. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean. Its good?. These animals can sniff it out. The first time I visited my future mother-in-law, she served ducks blood soup. He passed out. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Subscribe. "Video: People's Choice Adventurer of the Year Aleksander Doba", "Aleksander Doba Completes His Third Atlantic Crossing in a Kayak", "Police. Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. 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. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired engineer with a thick white beard and a piercing gaze, was a popular figure in Poland. The primary challenge is not physical. Neither Gabriela nor Bartek took him to the airport. He was named 2015 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. During the third rescue attempt he yelled a Polish vulgarity. 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. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. [4] He used a 23-foot kayak, weighing 1500 pounds when fully loaded. One day, a colleague of Dobas said the factorys kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. He did explain to her how to boil water, which to this day she finds ridiculous. 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. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Her department grew to 100 people from five. By ELIZABETH WEILPhotographs by JOAKIM ESKILDSEN 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. 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. At 67 years old, a Polish kayaker completes the longest open-water kayaking expedition across the Atlantic in history. AD: I'm not going to repeat paddling the Atlantic Ocean, but paddling something else maybe. Before he arrived in France, he made a few GoPro videos. That October, he paddled from Senegal to Brazil in 99 days. Three times. He was greeted by one journalist and the Polish ambassador. He does love Gabriela, however, and he does not want to cause her more pain. "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. *The official fanpage of Aleksander Doba. Dobas father, a master at building and repairing things from scraps, made his son a bike. There were spiders. He did it three times, setting records and becoming a national hero in Poland. . Why wetlands are so critical for life on Earth, Rest in compost? It's unique design is compromise between safety during extreme ocean challenge, and feeling that it should be close to spirit of kayaking. Doba maintains that his need to cross the Atlantic in a kayak did not originate within him. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. It was in 2010 that he started seriously planning to cross the Atlantic. 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. "I realized almost immediately that an ordinary kayak can't handle the open . The rope tethering Doba to the kayak came undone. Anyone can read what you share. Nonetheless, on May 29, 2016, Doba kayaked out from the New Jersey shore near the Statue of Liberty. He studied the water closely. Several books have been written about his adventures, including three written by Doba himself.[21]. Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . The idea was to do the crossing unsupported. 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. . The adventurous Pole always had a thirst for what he called katorga (hard labour), says Elizabeth Weil on The Daily. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. 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. It didnt work. He spent 40 unplanned days and nights wrestling with unfavorable winds and currents that sent him paddling in circles around the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Id never seen him like that. He hungered to paddle across an ocean so vast it seemed infinite. [9][4] Doba's journey started at 15:30 Polish time[10] on 26 October 2010 in Dakar, Senegal, and ended when he reached Brazil, touching dry land at 10:12 local time for the first time in 98 days, 23 hours, and 42 min. The 'extreme cruelty' around the global trade in frog legs, What does cancer smell like? The weather was disgusting humid and hot. The second trip was to raise the bar, Doba says. What most of us experience as suffering he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. 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. The whole nation was starving. After the transition, as the Poles call their countrys change to a democratic government in the early 1990s, Dobas trips became more extreme. People ask me how old I am, and I say, I am not old! A normal person wants to sit by the fire with their family for Christmas, his son added. 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. But. At the age of 70, Aleksander Doba became a legend with the kayak. If you have a crisis in the middle of the Atlantic and the closest land is the bottom, she asked, what will you do then? Doba said, There will be no such crisis. She knew she couldnt stop him. Aleksander Doba, a Polish traveler, adventurer, and world record holder who in his 60s became the first person to kayak unaided across the Atlantic and set the world record for the longest open-water kayaking expedition, has died while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro: The 74-year-old - once named by National Geographic as its Adventurer of the Year - had been "fulfilling his dream . Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. What he did not say, what was left hanging in the air, was that it would not be a big problem for him to go into the sea and die. Even here at home, Dobas physicality is sui generis. Dec 20, 2019 - Polish adventurer and kayaker Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic by kayak a few days before turning 71 years old. He tried to fix it and failed. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations to his fathers adventures. His hair and beard appear to be taken from a Michelangelo painting of God. A Polish adventurer who crossed the Atlantic three times by kayak unaided has died climbing Kilimanjaro, his family said on Tuesday. Mr. Dobas three trans-Atlantic voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, and in recent years he enjoyed celebrity status in his native Poland. If . According to multiple Polish media reports . He was at sea for 110 consecutive days. He was a few . Doba with the writer on the Brda River in central Poland in January. His pension is $700 a month. It was raining. Dobas apartment building is a five-story cube of blank concrete, with blank concrete stairwells. When he arrived at his destination, he was greeted by one journalist. The more you dont believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. Corley, Apr 21, 2014, in forum: All Things Boats & Boating. The 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. His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. My flu lingered. I joked with Gabriela that this was her Atlantic. The First Transatlantic Kayak Expedition was to check myself and my kayak. But still, I was so happy Id gotten away. 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. But Mr. Doba insisted, and he became a blip in the ocean all over again. 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. When Doba finally said, I will go on the North Atlantic, I said, I will not participate in this, Arminski told me. In the early 1970s, Mr. Doba graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering. Doba had been into hang gliding and sky diving, but the government often closed the airspace because Police was near the East German border. After his salt-water-drenched clothes became too irritating, he navigated the rest of his trip buck naked. Then there is [the] satisfaction of great achievements.. [11] Dobas maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He wanted to tough out his original plan. In both cases, they held me at gunpoint with rifles, pistols, and machetes. 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. 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. He is one of two people in the world to kayak across the Atlantic without a sail. Long distance kayaker Aleksander Doba is at it again. These involved such things as catamarans sailing in from the Bahamas and helicopters dropping rudder-repair gift packages out of the sky.
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