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. . He was famous for his long voyages crossing oceans and seas. 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. Meet the 70-year-old man who is crossing the Atlantic in a kayak Those were very, very hard times for both of us. Brent Stirton/Getty Images, for The New York Times, Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times. Their three sons, Dobas uncles, disappeared. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. Better than sushi.). This is a matter of the size and energy of the wave compared to the mass of the kayak. Beyond the boat rolling over, there is an even more catastrophic problem: A breaking wave transfers all the potential energy in the waves height into turbulent, violent kinetic energy. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. Kayaker Aleksander Doba paddles 5,400 miles across Atlantic But. They are falling, falling a catastrophe is about to happen. According to multiple Polish media reports . In 1989, he spent 108 days on the . Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba begins his translatlantic kayak adventure from New York to Lisbon on May 29, 2016 in New York. All rights reserved, Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. ALEKSANDER DOBA | The Daily Star Long distance kayaker Aleksander Doba is at it again. Log In Once logged in, you can add biography in the database. She felt bad about it, she said, and she felt judged, but here we were, werent we? His desire to conquer the sea grew from an innocent idea that gradually consumed him: He had kayaked everything else, so why not the Atlantic Ocean? [11] The Old Man and the Sea, and the Sea, and the Sea - Outside Online Olo is 300 kilograms empty. The second trip was to raise the bar, Doba says. The wooden-hulled, paddle-wheel SS Great Western built in 1838 is recognized as the first purpose-built transatlantic steamship, on a scheduled run back and forth from Bristol to New York City. 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. On the island, after 143 days at sea, Doba could hardly walk, and by the time he was ready to return to the Atlantic, it was late March, and the weather was turning bad. In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across . Then he sat down and fell asleep.. In the early 1970s, Mr. Doba graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering. 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.. 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. GitHub export from English Wikipedia. Nonetheless, Gabriela was not prepared for Dobas first trans-Atlantic expedition. He preferred to be dropped off on a cold river in the middle of the snow.. Physically, Doba did not seem to experience any difficulty beyond some uncomfortable and persistent skin rashes caused by prolonged exposure to saltwater. 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. How did this mountain lion reach an uninhabited island? Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. For a while the crossing was drama-free. If . A normal person wants to sit by the fire with their family for Christmas, his son added. Without the SPOT, nobody would be able to find the kayak if they needed to rescue him. Rather, he said, I was infected with a virus.. 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. Suffering tends to do more for the flagellant than it does for the flagellants loved ones. Shoot, the devil says. On it, he has written the names of rivers he has paddled. During the trip, he struggled against storms; his rudder was damaged and had to be repaired by sailors from a merchant vessel. With this design the paddler sits up off the water as well. When people are young, sometimes they are very jealous, she said, and want to keep a piece of their partner for themselves. Aleksander Doba. He has kayaked solo across the Atlantic 3 - reddit 2 November 2015. Imagine a plane the size of a kayak hitting turbulence, but in water rather than air; at sea level, water is hundreds of times denser. Doba alerted Chmielinski, who alerted Gabriela who didnt really want to know anything about how the trip was going. 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. Aleksander Doba - Traveler of the Year 2015 - Active and Eco 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. Then I saw it: a huge head, sticking out of the ocean, he told Canoe & Kayak magazine in 2014. Doba responded, In that case, Ill be on my way.. He wasnt a man who necessarily looked forward to spending Christmas with the family, his son Czeslaw said. This man rowed a fucking houseboat across an ocean, absolutely unreal. 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. He had been taking long trips for decades, but he always slept on land. After a while, the boys began to mutiny. X It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. But this trip felt different. 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. Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . After he graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, Doba met Gabriela Stucka, his future wife, on a backpacking trip. The air that day hovered around 40 degrees about 4 degrees Celsius. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired . 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. Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. 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. During the worst of it, the rope on his sea anchor broke. Arminski agreed to build the boat, and in spring of 2010, Olo, as Doba named his kayak after his own nickname, Olek was complete. El aventurero polaco Aleksander Doba muere en el Kilimanjaro When the ship circled back to him again, Mr. Doba shouted a vulgarity in Polish, and they left for good. At 15, Doba rode around Poland by himself. Touch device users, explore by touch or . The Greeks got the message and left. He tried to fix it and failed. (See map on left). This does not feel good.. Transatlantic crossings are passages of passengers and cargo across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe or Africa and the Americas. No retired man in Poland can afford to do these things, Doba explained. He did not say this because hes nave. However, in Brazil, while running the Amazon in my kayak in 2011, I survived two bouts of rogues with firearms and machetes. 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. 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. Even in seemingly reasonable conditions, rogue waves can cause havoc. Transatlantic Crossing - Encyclopedia Information 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. [2] Polish Grandpa Aleksander Doba Conquers Atlantic Again In Third 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. Watch. Aleksander "Olek" Doba, a retired engineer from Poland, left Lisbon, Portugal, in his kayak on October 5, 2013. 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 . Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic solo by the longest route, unaided and without a sail. Aleksander Doba - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 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). Forty-seven days after it stopped working, the phone came back on. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. Explore. A real katorga, says Doba, who is Polish katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. Polish long distance kayaker Aleksander Doba was planning to set off to attempt an Atlantic Ocean crossing alone at the age of 69 years. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. . An early escapade involved kayaking on the Baltic Sea at a time when the Communist Party, to discourage defectors, had declared it illegal. This would have been Doba's third transatlantic crossing. I was infected with a virus.. I was the one who would have to pay! he says. 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. He witnessed the formation of storm clouds and the deafening calm that accompanied them. A week later, three bandits went through my stuff for half an hour. In October 2010, Doba voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean by kayak, from Senegal to Brazil and completed his trip in February 2011. He married Gabriela Stucka in 1975, and they settled in a town called Police, where he got a job at a chemical plant. "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. [5][6], Doba's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was from Senegal to Brazil in 2010 and spanned 5394 kilometers. 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. The 69-year-old man. Alaksander Doba: Polish Adventurer And World - Christians for Truth His mother, Eugenia (Ilijna) Doba, was a homemaker. Meet the man who solo kayaked the Atlantic Ocean - three times. How a zoo break-in changed the life of an owl called Flaco, Naked mole rats are fertile until they die, study finds. Doba started talking about his second trans-Atlantic trip a few days after he returned from the first. 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. (That didnt work.) #AleksanderDoba Archives - Bernews 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. Id never seen him like that. Extreme Gear to Kayak Across the Atlantic - Men's Journal 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. Doba, for now, has a carefully constructed answer. 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. Gabriela traveled to Denmark to study how European Union countries handled problems like unemployment, alcoholism and lonely young mothers. 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. We know who this is. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again. Aleksander Doba. He did not want to be saved, so he waved the Greeks off. Even with a sleek kayak I get exhausted on 20K paddles. Aleksander Ludwik Doba was born on Sept. 9, 1946, in Swarzedz, Poland. 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. The trip was a fiasco. Still, Doba had no reason to plot a trip across the Atlantic . Long COVID patients turn to unproven treatments, Why evenings can be harder on people with dementia, This disease often goes under-diagnosedunless youre white, This sacred site could be Georgias first national park, See glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in Brazils other rainforest, 9 things to know about Holi, Indias most colorful festival, Anyone can discover a fossil on this beach. [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. His fingernails and toenails just about peeled off. There were small rivers, and we were squeezing through the bushes., Freed from the ballast of his sons, Doba started setting goals for himself: surpass the record of the greatest number of days paddled by a Polish man in a single year (108); kayak the longest possible route in Poland (1,189 kilometers). This time he would paddle from west to east, from New York to Lisbon where he would celebrate his 70th birthday after having spent . A freighter picked him up, and its Filipino crew repaired the rudder. He was 74. Dobas goal was to go continent to continent between the mainlands, from Senegal to Brazil, unsupported. The devil says, It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern. So the Frenchman jumps. Realizing that Olo might momentarily shatter into pieces, he strapped on a harness and scrambled across the deck to tie on a new anchor before crawling back to his nook. In photos from the ends of his trips, he looks ecstatic and feral, in the best possible sense, intrinsically wild and free. 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). 70-year old Polish long-distance kayaker Aleksander Doba has embarked on a third attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a kayak, departing New York City for Portugal, on a three-month long, 3000 . Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldnt, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Remembering Aleksander Doba, Who Kayaked Across Atlantic - OutdoorMaster
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