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 feats made him a national hero in Poland. The whale swam here, and there, all around my kayak. How did he justify it to himself? . 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 . Then he sat down and fell asleep.. I joked with Gabriela that this was her Atlantic. Aleksander doba. Transatlantic passenger crossings became faster, safer, and more reliable with the advent of steamships in the 19th century. Gabriela did not believe he would. Dobas electric desalinator broke, as it did before, and he had to spend several hours a day manually pumping seawater through an extremely fine filter to produce the five to nine liters of fresh water he needed to stay hydrated and prepare his freeze-dried food. He studied the water closely. No one had ever kayaked across open water for this many miles before his journey. June 09, 2016. She did not want to spend her life stressed, waiting for his return. Then the devil says to the Frenchman, You must jump. The Frenchman says, What does this mean?. Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba begins his translatlantic kayak adventure from New York to Lisbon on May 29, 2016 in New York. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. A storm had damaged his rudder. He was pummeled again by wind and waves. As he braced for his life, the rope tethering his sea anchor (the only thing keeping his kayak stable) broke off. The Daily. Ninety-nine days after leaving Senegal, Doba arrived in Brazil. In recent years, Mr. Doba enjoyed celebrity status in Poland. Doba tried to heat the pin with his camping stove and smash it straight. (Leaving shore is one of the trickiest parts of a trans-Atlantic journey.) Aleksander Doba, 68 years old is the first to complete the longest open-water kayaking expedition across the Atlantic. Why wetlands are so critical for life on Earth, Rest in compost? 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. 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. 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. After a while, the boys began to mutiny. It didnt work. Without the wings, the kayak had greater lateral stability and was less sensitive to wind. 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 . One year during the kayaking convention, Doba giddily reported, It was minus 18 degrees, and the number of people who showed up was the same!. From what we gather, he was euphoric to reach the summit. I dont know how I ended up here.. On the morning of Feb. 22, he reached Kilimanjaros summit with two guides. [5][6], Doba's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was from Senegal to Brazil in 2010 and spanned 5394 kilometers. Aleksander Doba is a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. She threatened divorce. 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. With a long grey beard, a big smile on the face and the looks of a pensioner on holiday, Aleksander Doba didn . 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. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Arminski agreed to build the boat, and in spring of 2010, Olo, as Doba named his kayak after his own nickname, Olek was complete. But so what? 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. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean. It felt good. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Aleksander Doba (9 September 1946 22 February 2021) was a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. One of the last people to see Mr. Doba alive was a Polish climber named Boguslaw Wawrzyniak, who was also summiting Kilimanjaro that day. When people are young, sometimes they are very jealous, she said, and want to keep a piece of their partner for themselves. 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. AD: When I packed things carefully and ate some food, I could lie down on my back. The professor eventually persuaded Doba to cross the southern Atlantic with him from Ghana to Brazil in separate one-man kayaks, lashing those kayaks together at night to make a platform on which to sleep. The second trip was to raise the bar, Doba says. Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. He wanted to tough out his original plan. First, five bandits robbed me for three hours. 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. Still, Doba refused. In 1989, he surpassed the record for the most days paddled by a Polish man in a single year. I was infected with a virus. In 2003, when he was already the most seasoned kayaker in Poland, a Polish professor approached him to get advice on his quest to kayak across the Baltic Sea. The Polish . He designed an unsinkable kayak that contained food lockers and a cabin to sleep in. His fingernails and toenails just about peeled off. If you arent willing to suffer, you can do nothing. In 2013, when he paddled from Portugal to Florida, a Greek tanker made the mistake of trying to rescue him. He also snacked on dried fruit and his wifes plum jam, but he ran out of that halfway across the ocean. 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. [1] In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across the Atlantic. I did it with no stuntman, Doba told me proudly. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. 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. He was assaulted by hailstorms of flying fish. 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. 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. 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. Doba was a little disappointed. [4] He studied mechanical engineering at Poznan University of Technology and worked in a chemical factory most of his life. His clothes, permeated with salt, refused to dry. . Can we bring a species back from the brink? 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 kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean three times, the last time in 2017, when he was 70. Along the way, he was thrown from his kayak in a storm. Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. [2] Phone, bad. He gave the thumbs down. Previous Story: 8.31.17. I have two sons and two granddaughters. "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 crossings are passages of passengers and cargo across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe or Africa and the Americas. However, in general, from my very low point of observation, the ocean looked clean. But Mr. Doba insisted, and he became a blip in the ocean all over again. And he began preparing to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, an expedition that had long been on his bucket list. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldnt, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. 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. An ocean crossing is not something to undertake lightly. Her last article for the magazine was about a Chinese mafia don. 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. Before the second expedition, there were similarly heavy struggles between us. 2 November 2015. This was not Dobas first transatlantic crossing in OLO. His body appears to be assembled from parts belonging to people of vastly different ages. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. [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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. Dobas maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. For a while the crossing was drama-free. But this trip felt different. Along with jars of his wifes plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars and homemade wine. At the time of this writing, real-time tracking indicates that Aleksander Doba is on or near the small French Island of Ushant on the south-western end of the English Channel. If . 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 addition to Czeslaw, Mr. Doba is survived by his wife; another son, Bartek; a sister, Wanda Kedzia; and three grandchildren. Today. As a young man in Communist Poland, he had joined a local kayaking club, and he took to the sport avidly. Forty-seven days after it stopped working, the phone came back on. [4][17] With his wife Gabriela he had two sons: Bartomiej and Czesaw. 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. Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. In 1980, his co-workers asked him if he wanted to join their kayaking club, and soon he was spending all his weekends out on the water. 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. I was not sure if they would leave me alive. A Polish adventurer who crossed the Atlantic three times by kayak unaided has died climbing Kilimanjaro, his family said on Tuesday. He woke up on shore to the sound of screaming his own. You can sit and die. After his salt-water-drenched clothes became too irritating, he navigated the rest of his trip buck naked. 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. Alexander Doba returns to the Atlantic. He was known for his long voyages crossing oceans. 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. She also left her daughter at age 8 months to go climb a mountain in Antarctica because she was trying to complete the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each continent, and achieving that goal, at that time, felt like a matter of life or death. I sense some . He does love Gabriela, however, and he does not want to cause her more pain. Then shed leave. In both cases, they held me at gunpoint with rifles, pistols, and machetes. These skeletons may have the answer, Scientists are making advancements in birth controlfor men, Blood cleaning? Aleksander Doba Olo . 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. After taking in the view, he sat on a rock to rest. His son Czeslaw said the cause was asphyxia resulting from high-altitude pulmonary edema. 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? The air that day hovered around 40 degrees about 4 degrees Celsius. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility. [4] He used a 23-foot kayak, weighing 1500 pounds when fully loaded. Doba rotated through three kinds of freeze-dried porridge for breakfast, four kinds of freeze-dried soup for lunch and an assortment of a dozen freeze-dried entrees. The 68 year-old mechanical engineer from the Polish city of Police, talked to Polska.pl about wind traps, the glistening . He did it three times, setting records and becoming a national hero in Poland. He playfully tapped the shells of turtles that swam alongside him. Several books have been written about his adventures, including three written by Doba himself.[21]. (That didnt work.) 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. Nie chce byc malym szarym czlowiekiem, he told me. Mr Doba, from Poland, came ashore at Le Conquet, Brittany, which is . Sadly, he passed away this week while climbing Kilimanjaro. An elementary school honored him with a statue in his scruffy, bearded likeness. All the big muscles in the body are useless. Doba, for now, has a carefully constructed answer. 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. sport. But after she got the bill for $500, she says, the desire to talk decreased. What most of us experience as suffering he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. Water trapped in Olos storage lockers short-circuited the electric desalinator. It should be noted that he accomplished it using only weekends and normal, 26-day leave. 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. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations to his fathers adventures. Bigger than the Atlantic! Doba chimed in. 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. So I thought: Well, he might not come back.. Three times, he paddled 200 to 300 miles, only to get pushed back by the winds and currents. I know you will not jump. And the Polish man jumps., Wojciechowska looked at me squarely, to make sure I understood. He was 74. Doba did anyway. Doba started talking about his second trans-Atlantic trip a few days after he returned from the first. 75 year old adventurer climbed on the highest mountain of Africa and soon after passed away. 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. An early escapade involved kayaking on the Baltic Sea at a time when the Communist Party, to discourage defectors, had declared it illegal. 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. Kayak fishing became very popular during the recession of around 2008-2010 when gas prices were soaring and recreational boating was becoming too expensive for . It looks good, it smells good, probably everybody likes it. 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. 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 crossed the ocean three different times in one of these and spent several months completely alone. Eco-friendly burial alternatives, explained. I was the one who would have to pay! he says. He is paddling for New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 4,700 nautical miles away. She threw herself into her work, which had become far more rewarding than she ever imagined it could when she trained as a social worker in the 1970s. He is one of two people in the world to kayak across the Atlantic without a sail. 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. 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 most serious trouble came for Doba when he hit a storm that lasted two days. (Doba doesnt speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) UPDATE: The votes are inmore than 521,000 of them, more than ever beforeand we have a winner. Then the AA batteries for his SPOT personal tracking device failed, and the retired engineer had to rig a new, delicate connection using AAAs. Shoot, the devil says. Physically, Doba did not seem to experience any difficulty beyond some uncomfortable and persistent skin rashes caused by prolonged exposure to saltwater. Once he got far enough out from the shore, he spent most of the trip naked, deciding it was more comfortable. 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. One day, a colleague of Dobas said the factorys kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. He kept chasing adventure. Through the ocean. Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland. He lost 45 pounds. Doba also brought two sailing harnesses, which resemble climbing harnesses but are worn on the chest instead of the legs; he uses these to attach himself with a carabiner to the boat. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. Gabriela joined us to talk at the dining table, where she had set bowls of peanuts, raisins, chocolates, cookies and cake and French presses of coffee and tea. Without the SPOT, nobody would be able to find the kayak if they needed to rescue him. He intended to keep muscle tone in his legs by swimming, but he had to abort that plan because his body in the water attracted sharks. At the age of 70, Aleksander Doba became a legend with the kayak. Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. Kayaking is an absurd form of long-distance ocean travel. 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. He gives himself control. 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. He had slept only three hours the night before and had not even had time to double-check all his gear.
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