Doba maintains that his need to cross the Atlantic in a kayak did not originate within him. These animals can sniff it out. Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. After Gabriela told me about Christmas, Doba began telling a story. 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. Looking for Mars on Earth Sean Dudley. On it, he has written the names of rivers he has paddled. 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. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. It should be noted that he accomplished it using only weekends and normal, 26-day leave. Arminski, the boatbuilder, spent many hours trying to argue Doba out of it. However, in general, from my very low point of observation, the ocean looked clean. He started in Lisbon, Portugal on October 5th, 2013 and the goal was to arrive in Florida sailing 5,400 nautial miles. A normal person wants to sit by the fire with their family for Christmas, his son added. After 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes at sea, Doba and his . His clothes, permeated with salt, refused to dry. He lost 14kg in 14 weeks of the journey. 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 . He spent 40 unplanned days and nights wrestling with unfavorable winds and currents that sent him paddling in circles around the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Dobas apartment building is a five-story cube of blank concrete, with blank concrete stairwells. An elementary school honored him with a statue in his scruffy, bearded likeness. His pension is $700 a month. Doba did finally accept help two weeks later. [1] In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across the Atlantic. Then, on Dec. 19, Dobas phone stopped working. A documentary about the life of Aleksander Doba entitled Happy Olo was released in 2017. But still, I was so happy Id gotten away. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. I joked with Gabriela that this was her Atlantic. When he saw shooting stars at night, he made wishes that, he said, later came true. X The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. The idea was to do the crossing unsupported. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach. He preferred to be dropped off on a cold river in the middle of the snow.. On the morning of Feb. 22, he reached Kilimanjaros summit with two guides. Will he cross the Atlantic again? He gives himself control. Once Poland became a democracy, social structures and attitudes changed. In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across . Today. I sense some . [4] He used a 23-foot kayak, weighing 1500 pounds when fully loaded. 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. Even with a sleek kayak I get exhausted on 20K paddles. . We know who this is. He said it because he has reimagined the concept of crisis, just as he has reimagined the concept of suffering. During the trip, he struggled against storms; his rudder was damaged and had to be repaired by sailors from a merchant vessel. Previous Story: 8.31.17. [2] AD: I'm not going to repeat paddling the Atlantic Ocean, but paddling something else maybe. 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.) Doba declined the ropes the crew offered to throw him. Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. 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. In both cases, they held me at gunpoint with rifles, pistols, and machetes. My decision to continue didnt take longer than a few seconds.. (This did work, in that Doba managed to drill the holes, but he couldnt steer.) Aleksander Doba (9 September 1946 22 February 2021) was a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility. With a long grey beard, a big smile on the face and the looks of a pensioner on holiday, Aleksander Doba didn . Doba with Mr. Olek, the kayak he uses on rivers locally. Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. The huge group of his supporters keeps growing . These skeletons may have the answer, Scientists are making advancements in birth controlfor men, Blood cleaning? A freighter picked him up, and its Filipino crew repaired the rudder. Previous generations had not fared better. June 09, 2016. Doba with the writer on the Brda River in central Poland in January. 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. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. [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). Aleksander Doba: On both routes, I saw floating garbage close to the coasts of Africa and Europe. The Olo, Doba's 2010 kayak. Meet the man who solo kayaked the Atlantic Ocean - three times. He didnt particularly want to be rescued, anyway. 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 . But the community raised money for him, and on Oct. 3, 2013, off he went. Shoot, the devil says. 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.. Hed been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jerseys Barnegat Bay. Aleksander Ludwik Doba was born on Sept. 9, 1946, in Swarzedz, Poland. The Greeks got the message and left. His feats made him a national hero in Poland. 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. Gabriela did not believe he would. (Photo: Iwona) A 12,417 kilometer journey between Lisbon and Florida. He has kayaked solo across the Atlantic 3 times, most recently in 2017 at the age of 70. . After clearing Barnegat Bay and heading for the horizon, he was soon a floating blip in the ocean. I dont know how I ended up here.. [4][17] With his wife Gabriela he had two sons: Bartomiej and Czesaw. Doba describes the tedium as a form of dementia: Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of repetitions. The combination of a stable kayak and a higher sitting position make the sit-on-top or SOT kayaks a better design for fishing. I did it with no stuntman, Doba told me proudly. 1,277 talking about this. 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. Aleksander Doba decided to kayak across the Atlantic three times between the ages of 63 and 71 because he didn't want to be "a little gray man". Three days in, Doba received his first storm warning. After another storm, Olos rudder was seriously damaged, so he reluctantly contacted his team via satellite phone seeking help. Aleksander Doba was the most accomplished trans-oceanic solo kayaker in the world, who continued setting records into his seventies. Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . But I was my own little speck in the vast universe. Still, Doba refused. It was like my wishes came true. I wished him luck in reaching the summit, Mr. Wawrzyniak said in a phone interview. By choosing it, he casts himself in the role of hero, not victim. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired . Adventurer of 2015 ! He was happy to see his friends, team and the warm Welcome of the Bretons. 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. But this voyage was too dangerous, she told me, to keep her head where she liked it to be, stuck in the sand. National Geographic . So I thought: Well, he might not come back.. Mr. Dobas three trans-Atlantic voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, and in recent years he enjoyed celebrity status in his native Poland. 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. Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. Four days later, after capsizing repeatedly, Doba finally cleared the Sandy Hook peninsula and left lower New York Bay. 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. He also kayaked the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle; on that trip, he was thrown from his boat during a storm and woke up to the sound of his own screaming after washing ashore. Then there is [the] satisfaction of great achievements.. He thought about his dead parents. 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. Polish sea kayaker Aleksander Doba - known for making the transatlantic journey from Europe to North America aboard a kayak - passed away this week. 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. I hope they will learn not to be afraid to dream, turn dreams into plans, and bring plans to reality. Ninety-nine days after leaving Senegal, Doba arrived in Brazil. Someone had forgotten to fund the prepaid credit card that covered the bill. 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. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. 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 roughly 5,000-year-old human remains were found in graves from the Yamnaya culture, and the discovery may partially explain their rapid expansion throughout Europe.