Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. Chmielinski and others came up with what Doba describes as exotic and expensive methods of rescue. He rode through 30-foot waves. Hed been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jerseys Barnegat Bay. So the devil says to the German man: You must jump. 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. His kayak,I rowed varsity crew in highschool and got into kayaking and poling in college. His mother, Eugenia (Ilijna) Doba, was a homemaker. Three weeks later, he reached Florida. But after she got the bill for $500, she says, the desire to talk decreased. His fingernails and toenails just about peeled off. Its good?. In both cases, they held me at gunpoint with rifles, pistols, and machetes. Aleksander Doba has died age 74 on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania on Monday February 22. Its 20-meter-long tail was wagging. When people are young, sometimes they are very jealous, she said, and want to keep a piece of their partner for themselves. An expedition, he told me. He wanted to tough out his original plan. Transatlantic crossings are passages of passengers and cargo across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe or Africa and the Americas. Three years later in 2013 he crossed the . I am not German always 9 a.m. paddle, he explained. The 69-year-old man. Bright green moss covered the trees, egrets stretched like sheets blowing on a line and the occasional ray of sun broke through the low clouds. He is a family man, whose positive attitude to life is contagious. At 15, Doba rode around Poland by himself. Subscribe. The biggest piece of junk floating in the water was a shattered, plastic 200-liter trash barrel. GitHub export from English Wikipedia. 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). Kayaking is an absurd form of long-distance ocean travel. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Szczecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht-builder named Andrzej Arminski. However, in Brazil, while running the Amazon in my kayak in 2011, I survived two bouts of rogues with firearms and machetes. In 1989, he surpassed the record for the most days paddled by a Polish man in a single year. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. Polish sea kayaker Aleksander Doba - known for making the transatlantic journey from Europe to North America aboard a kayak - passed away this week. He wasnt a man who necessarily looked forward to spending Christmas with the family, his son Czeslaw said. Aleksander Doba (9 September 1946 22 February 2021) was a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. 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. One of Earth's loneliest volcanoes holds an extraordinary secret. 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. [1] In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across the Atlantic. Me, fine, Mr. Doba shouted in English to the ships crew, giving a thumbs-up. Then there is [the] satisfaction of great achievements.. Id never seen him like that. Doba was a little disappointed. [3], Doba first tried kayaking at age 34 on a trip organised by the company he was working for. (Very fine, he said. Watch. I was not sure if they would leave me alive. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility. Aleksander Doba is a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. All the big muscles in the body are useless. Before he arrived in France, he made a few GoPro videos. Why wetlands are so critical for life on Earth, Rest in compost? In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. All rights reserved. I dont know how I ended up here.. He was named 2014 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. He thought about his dead parents. An early escapade involved kayaking on the Baltic Sea at a time when the Communist Party, to discourage defectors, had declared it illegal. His mean speed was 2.26km/h, and he averaged 54km per 24 hours, with a maximum 24hour distance of 126.5km. The Daily. An elementary school honored him with a statue in his scruffy, bearded likeness. So, Gabriela told me, she laid out for her husband all the reasons trans-Atlantic kayaking was stupid. I joked with Gabriela that this was her Atlantic. In mid-September 2013, Doba still did not possess all the gear he wanted to take on his trip. "Video: People's Choice Adventurer of the Year Aleksander Doba", "Aleksander Doba Completes His Third Atlantic Crossing in a Kayak", "Police. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. It looks good, it smells good, probably everybody likes it. 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. Log In Once logged in, you can add biography in the database. Chmielinski interpreted this communication blackout as a sign that Doba was deeply despairing, perhaps because he was alone again after being with the crew on Baltic Light, perhaps because, now that he had accepted help, he worried that he would not earn a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for kayaking solo from continent to continent unsupported. [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. Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. 75 year old adventurer climbed on the highest mountain of Africa and soon after passed away. The air that day hovered around 40 degrees about 4 degrees Celsius. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations to his fathers adventures. 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. On the warmer part of the Atlantic Ocean, flying fish were a big, unexpected attraction. 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. He later spent 100 days paddling the circumference of the Baltic Sea. To go into the sea and die that would be a problem for my family and a problem for Andrzej Arminski, too, Doba acknowledged. 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". In 1989, he spent 108 days on the . "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. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again. His 12,417 kilometer journey began in Lisbon on October 5, 2013 and ended in Florida on April 17, 2014. Polish adventurer Aleksander Doba, who completed three solo kayak trips across the Atlantic, has died at the age of 74 during an attempt to scale the highest peak in Africa, his family said on . He hungered to paddle across an ocean so vast it seemed infinite. He did not say this because hes nave. This time he would paddle from west to east, from New York to Lisbon where he would celebrate his 70th birthday after having spent . Bats and agaves make tequila possibleand theyre both at risk, This empress was the most dangerous woman in Rome. Aleksander Doba is a Polish traveler and explorer. A freighter picked him up, and its Filipino crew repaired the rudder. After, on weekends Doba would put a kayak on a train, debark as close to a river as possible and walk the kayak, on a wheeled contraption built from bicycle and stroller parts, 25 miles if necessary to put in. 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. [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. If a breaking wave hit Olo with no sea anchor, Doba said, I knew I would roll over many times. Alexander Doba returns to the Atlantic. 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. But by katorga, Doba does not mean an activity he does not wish to do. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. Today. Doba traveled an average of 30 miles a day, often paddling at night, when the temperatures dropped. This site is to promote polish paddler Aleksander Doba and his highly respectable . Aleksander Doba, 70, completed his transatlantic journey on Sunday after setting off on the epic quest from New Jersey in May. Doba returned to his cabin somewhat shocked to be alive. But Mr. Doba hungered to cross an ocean so vast that it seemed infinite, and he began plotting to kayak the Atlantic. 02/23/21 AT 12:35 PM. I was just paddling down the river, he explained. 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. His hands and forearms look 30, straight off a Montana roper. Will he cross the Atlantic again? 1,277 talking about this. Juan Villarino waits for a ride in the Namibian desert. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. Create Biography . 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. Photo: Wikipedia. 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. But. Neither Gabriela nor Bartek took him to the airport. When he arrived in Brazil he weighed 64kg. 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. Nonetheless, Gabriela was not prepared for Dobas first trans-Atlantic expedition. AD: When I packed things carefully and ate some food, I could lie down on my back. My phone exploded with hysterical texts from home. His pension is $700 a month. After taking in the view, he sat on a rock to rest. According to multiple Polish media reports . A storm had damaged his rudder. National Geographic . Three times. He is paddling for New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 4,700 nautical miles away. Id been feeling buried, by stuff exactly as predictable as youd imagine for a working mother of two kids. Absolutely no. Previous Story: 8.31.17. Adventurer of 2015 ! But this specific soup I dont like. That was a shock to his mother-in-law, he said, but a short one. After a while, the boys began to mutiny. Physically, Doba did not seem to experience any difficulty beyond some uncomfortable and persistent skin rashes caused by prolonged exposure to saltwater. With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. He arrived at New Smyrna Beach, Florida on April 19, 2014. Kayak legend Aleksander Doba (74 years) Dies on Kilimanjaro Summit. 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. 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!. 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. . He did not want to be saved, so he waved the Greeks off. I never expected it would be so big, she said. After I downed it, she laughed. Nobody cares if you cross the Atlantic in a kayak. I was not in a great state. [18], Doba died while climbing Kilimanjaro on February 22, 2021. My decision to continue didnt take longer than a few seconds.. Suffering tends to do more for the flagellant than it does for the flagellants loved ones. Replies: 5 Views: 2,045. . 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. Doba started talking about his second trans-Atlantic trip a few days after he returned from the first. The 'extreme cruelty' around the global trade in frog legs, What does cancer smell like? Without the SPOT, nobody would be able to find the kayak if they needed to rescue him. The primary challenge is not physical. 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 tool he used to accomplish this was a sea anchor, basically a parachute, secured to the stern of the kayak with a rope, that he set underwater to increase drag. People ask me how old I am, and I say, I am not old! A breaking wave can do whatever it wants to a kayak. There was no engineering Olo for this. Many things can go wrong while at sea, and if something does go wrong, help can be . In 2013, when he paddled from Portugal to Florida, a Greek tanker made the mistake of trying to rescue him. The 70-Year-Old Master Kayaker It looks straight out of a dystopian young-adult novel in which the state is intent on creating little gray men. Polish adventurer and kayaker Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic by kayak a few days before turning 71 years old. 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. This time Dobas trip was far more successful, which is not to say it was pleasant. [14], On September 3, 2017, Doba completed his third solo transatlantic kayak trip when he kayaked into a port in Le Conquet, France from Barnegat Bay, New Jersey in May 2017. [5][6], Doba's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was from Senegal to Brazil in 2010 and spanned 5394 kilometers. 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. The kayak OLO was professionally designed and made in Andrzej Arminski shipyard located in Szczecin, Poland . Not according to biology or history. Aleksander Doba was the most accomplished trans-oceanic solo kayaker in the world, who continued setting records into his seventies. (He ate all the meat options first.) "It is with profound regret that we announce the death of the great kayaker Alesander Doba on February 22. [7][8] He was 65 years old when he undertook this journey. Transatlantic passenger crossings became faster, safer, and more reliable with the advent of steamships in the 19th century. 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. Every three weeks there is a storm with waves that can capsize the kayak. Doba was ready, Chmielinski suspected, to just drift off into the eternal vastness and go down with his ship. Directories Newly added. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. 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. First, five bandits robbed me for three hours. Rather, he said, I was infected with a virus.. One day, a colleague of Dobas said the factorys kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. Still, Doba refused. He was happy to see his friends, team and the warm Welcome of the Bretons. [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). So Doba moves toward the crisis, just as he moves toward the suffering. After four months at sea, Polish adventure kayaker Aleksander Doba has arrived in Bermuda where he will make repairs to his broken rudder before continuing o. In three weeks, Ill be 71, he says in one. Dobas maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. How many capsizes can you survive?. He once became convinced that someone was watching him. Dobas response to Gabrielas concern about what hed do in a crisis, if the closest land was the bottom, was to say there will be no crisis. Aleksander Doba. Phone, bad. He gave the thumbs down. People stopped him on the street to take selfies. After another storm, Olos rudder was seriously damaged, so he reluctantly contacted his team via satellite phone seeking help. 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. During the expedition storms threw him off course and he had to sail 1,300 additional nautical miles to . 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. For a while the crossing was drama-free. 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. Through the ocean. She did not want to spend her life stressed, waiting for his return. A former chemical plant engineer who lived in a little river town, Mr. Doba had long been the most accomplished kayaker in his country. His skin looks 71. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. By choosing it, he casts himself in the role of hero, not victim. He married Gabriela Stucka in 1975, and they settled in a town called Police, where he got a job at a chemical plant. UPDATE: The votes are inmore than 521,000 of them, more than ever beforeand we have a winner. 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. [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. When he saw shooting stars at night, he made wishes that, he said, later came true. Along with jars of his wifes plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars and homemade wine. In 2010 and again in 2013 he kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean westward under his own power. And yet Doba describes his youth as magical, almost fantastical. The devil, a German man, a Frenchman and a Polish man are all in a hot-air balloon, Wojciechowska said. The fabric smelled horrendous and aggravated his skin, so he abandoned clothes. In 2010, when he kayaked from Senegal to Brazil, his skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, his fingernails nearly peeled off, and his eyes suffered from conjunctivitis. 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. 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. On the kayak. These skeletons may have the answer, Scientists are making advancements in birth controlfor men, Blood cleaning? 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. 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. Recently, just before his 71 st birthday, he sailed single-handed across the Atlantic for the third time in his kayak. Home. Doba paddled naked. [15][16] He has also jumped 14 times with parachute, piloted gliders for a total of 250 hours, and practiced cycling. 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. sport. He has kayaked solo across the Atlantic 3 times, most recently in 2017 at the age of 70. . Doba also called his wife, twice. After the transition, as the Poles call their countrys change to a democratic government in the early 1990s, Dobas trips became more extreme. 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 wished him luck in reaching the summit, Mr. Wawrzyniak said in a phone interview. Those were very, very hard times for both of us. . The more you dont believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. Here, Fiann Paul from the Ocean Rowing Society International remembers this most accomplished of adventurers. Doba tried to heat the pin with his camping stove and smash it straight. Please upgrade your browser. He grew up ice skating on ponds and skiing through forests. AD: OLO is 23 feet long and three feet wide and weighs 1,100 pounds, and I used a nine-foot-long kayak paddle. He was 74. His first crossing was in 2011, from Senegal, West Africa, to Brazil, a 99-day journey. (Leaving shore is one of the trickiest parts of a trans-Atlantic journey.) I did not think I could find myself in something so downing, he texted to Chmielinski, somewhat incomprehensibly, two weeks later. Once he got far enough out from the shore, he spent most of the trip naked, deciding it was more comfortable. 2013Aleksander Doba67. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. On the morning of Feb. 22, he reached Kilimanjaros summit with two guides. He tried to fix it and failed. And a tourist does not prepare himself too much. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Mr. Doba told The New York Times Magazine in 2018. Sadly, he passed away this week while climbing Kilimanjaro. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldnt, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. A Polish adventurer who crossed the Atlantic three times by kayak unaided has died climbing Kilimanjaro, his family said on Tuesday. Your . June 09, 2016. If . He passed out. 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. [2] But still, I was so happy Id gotten away. The idea was to do the crossing unsupported. The first time I visited my future mother-in-law, she served ducks blood soup. When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. The devil says, It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern. So the Frenchman jumps. Gabriela, she says, was to be honest, a little pissed that Doba was going again. Sean Dudley. He was a few . The first time Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba tried to paddle across the Atlantic Ocean in 2007, he didn't get far. This man rowed a fucking houseboat across an ocean, absolutely unreal. Looking for Mars on Earth Forty-seven days after it stopped working, the phone came back on. His chest looks 50. That October, he paddled from Senegal to Brazil in 99 days. Aleksander Doba appears to be one such individual. Kind, gracious, enthusiastic Poles kept bringing me shots of alcohol, which I tried to wave off. 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. Even with a sleek kayak I get exhausted on 20K paddles. Touch device users, explore by touch or . F. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? Dec 20, 2019 - Polish adventurer and kayaker Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic by kayak a few days before turning 71 years old. 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. He died like an adventurer after . After his salt-water-drenched clothes became too irritating, he navigated the rest of his trip buck naked. He kept no schedule. We know who this is. 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 in the Atlantic before arriving in Florida in April 2014. ' laughs intrepid kayaker Aleksander Doba. The adventurous Pole always had a thirst for what he called katorga (hard labour), says Elizabeth Weil on The Daily. He witnessed the formation of storm clouds and the deafening calm that accompanied them. 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. Then he sat down and fell asleep.. (Doba doesnt speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based outside Berlin. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. If you arent willing to suffer, you can do nothing. He said it because he has reimagined the concept of crisis, just as he has reimagined the concept of suffering. He paddled and he paddled and he paddled and he paddled, a real katorga. [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. He playfully tapped the shells of turtles that swam alongside him. 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. Then the devil says to the Frenchman, You must jump. The Frenchman says, What does this mean?. 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. 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 . Reviews, News & Stories Paddling Buyer's Guide Paddling Trip Guide. Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. 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 . With a long grey beard, a big smile on the face and the looks of a pensioner on holiday, Aleksander Doba didn . On Sunday, May 7 2017, Alexander "Olek" Doba, took off from Sandy Hook Bay in New York City in his well-known kayak "OLO".