Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. I am generally physically active, ride a bike, work in my garden, and enjoy walking.. 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. No one had ever kayaked across open water for this many miles before his journey. The biggest piece of junk floating in the water was a shattered, plastic 200-liter trash barrel. Aleksander Doba spent 110 days alone at sea. During the worst of it, the rope on his sea anchor broke. 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 . Neither Gabriela nor Bartek took him to the airport. But the inside of the apartment feels much better: shoes in the entrance hall; pencil marks of grandchildrens heights in the kitchen door jamb; atlases, kayaking trophies and snow globes of family photos in the living room. Arminski, the boatbuilder, spent many hours trying to argue Doba out of it. His eyes blew up with conjunctivitis. He also snacked on dried fruit and his wifes plum jam, but he ran out of that halfway across the ocean. 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). After the transition, as the Poles call their countrys change to a democratic government in the early 1990s, Dobas trips became more extreme. Along with jars of his wife's plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars . Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. Her last article for the magazine was about a Chinese mafia don. The air that day hovered around 40 degrees about 4 degrees Celsius. *The official fanpage of Aleksander Doba. I was the one who would have to pay! he says. She threatened divorce. Anyone can read what you share. Doba traveled an average of 30 miles a day, often paddling at night, when the temperatures dropped. It didnt work. The departure for the second trip, from Portugal to Florida, turned out to be very abrupt. The Polish . After a while, the boys began to mutiny. 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. The 69-year-old man. He married Gabriela Stucka in 1975, and they settled in a town called Police, where he got a job at a chemical plant. But Mr. Doba had tested the limits of possibility during his two previous Atlantic crossings. His kayak,I rowed varsity crew in highschool and got into kayaking and poling in college. Heres why each season begins twice. First, five bandits robbed me for three hours. A freighter picked him up, and its Filipino crew repaired the rudder. Kayak legend Aleksander Doba (74 years) Dies on Kilimanjaro Summit. What if we could clean them out? [4] He quickly started going on kayaking expeditions regularly. Then shed leave. [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. 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? "I realized almost immediately that an ordinary kayak can't handle the open . Rather, he said, I was infected with a virus.. A normal person wants to sit by the fire with their family for Christmas, his son added. The fact that Doba knows this is clear in his eyes. Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland. He lost 45 pounds. And a tourist does not prepare himself too much. [1] In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across the Atlantic. On the warmer part of the Atlantic Ocean, flying fish were a big, unexpected attraction. Adventurer of 2015 ! Today, listen to the story of one man who chose to paddle toward the existential crisis that is life, crossing the Atlantic alone in a kayak. In both cases, they held me at gunpoint with rifles, pistols, and machetes. The World's Greatest Hitchhiker All rights reserved. And he began preparing to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, an expedition that had long been on his bucket list. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. Bats and agaves make tequila possibleand theyre both at risk, This empress was the most dangerous woman in Rome. He said many times that he didnt want to die in his bed, his son said. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. (Doba doesnt speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. 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. 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. An elementary school honored him with a statue in his scruffy, bearded likeness. She knew I didnt like it.. At age 64, after 42 years of marriage, she still adores Doba, and her acceptance of him is absolute easier than it used to be, in fact. 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. People ask me how old I am, and I say, I am not old! 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. (See map on left). Nonetheless, Gabriela was not prepared for Dobas first trans-Atlantic expedition. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. Then a woman who noticed me coughing approached with a little glass of thick red liquid that looked like cough syrup. The trip was a fiasco. Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. He was famous for his long voyages crossing oceans and seas. Doba's wizened but muscular frame and ancient, friendly face became familiar not just to the adventure world bu Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. Their three sons, Dobas uncles, disappeared. However, in general, from my very low point of observation, the ocean looked clean. He then sat down on a rock and "just fell asleep".[19]. F. Pinterest. [13], On October 5, 2013, at age 67, he departed from Lisbon (Portugal) for a second transatlantic voyage, with the intention of paddling 5,400 miles across the Atlantic's widest point. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. 02/23/21 AT 12:35 PM. When making potentially dangerous or financial decisions, always employ and consult appropriate professionals. Doba also called his wife, twice. Do you know how fast they go? he said. He woke up on shore to the sound of screaming his own. His body appears to be assembled from parts belonging to people of vastly different ages. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. 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". 2 November 2015. Bigger than the Atlantic! Doba chimed in. One of Earth's loneliest volcanoes holds an extraordinary secret. The majority of 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. 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. Then he sat down and fell asleep.. Doba returned to his cabin somewhat shocked to be alive. He witnessed the formation of storm clouds and the deafening calm that accompanied them. He kept no schedule. Doba flew back to Poland; returned to his hometown, Police, in the countrys northwest, where he had been managing maintenance and repairs at an enormous chemical factory; and swore off kayaking with a partner ever again. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. After clearing Barnegat Bay and heading for the horizon, he was soon a floating blip in the ocean. 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. 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. His fingernails and toenails just about peeled off. The risk of kayaking the North Atlantic, Arminski believed, was irresponsibly, even amorally high. Many things can go wrong while at sea, and if something does go wrong, help can be . Then there is [the] satisfaction of great achievements.. 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. Explore. Watch. After more than three months of paddling, a Polish adventure junkie has crossed the Atlantic in a 23 foot custom kayak. Three years later in 2013 he crossed the . Gabriela, she says, was to be honest, a little pissed that Doba was going again. Or the afternoon, a week later, on that same river, when he succumbed to the temptation of eating pancakes, tomato soup and rice at the Milk Bar restaurant when he should have been at his campsite, by his kayak, eating cold canned goulash in order to condition his body for arctic temperatures. 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. 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. 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. He took us on long trips, only him and us both, in the middle of nowhere, and we hated that, Bartek recalled. It should be noted that he accomplished it using only weekends and normal, 26-day leave. [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. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. His chest looks 50. He drank five cups a day of instant coffee.
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