In February 2014, somewhere in the western Atlantic, the rudder of Aleksander Doba's yellow kayak snapped in a storm. A headwind had been pushing him east for weeks, so the kayaker, sixty-seven years old at the time, built a spare rudder from material taken from a food box. For more than forty days he paddled in circles on a small patch of ocean, and for forty-seven days no one on land knew whether he was alive: his locator had corroded, one satellite phone had failed at the start, the other stayed silent. Even so, he did not call for help.
Retirement on the ocean
Aleksander Doba was born in 1946. He had kayaked since his youth, but he took on the great ocean crossings only after he turned sixty, at an age when most people had long since left the water. Over the previous twenty years he had paddled the Baltic, Lake Baikal and the whole Vistula, and it was on those trips that he learned solitude on the water.
For his crossings he used the kayak "Olo", named after his own nickname Olek. It was seven metres long and a metre wide, weighed around seven hundred and fifty kilograms with its equipment, and was built from carbon walls layered over a light core, which kept it unsinkable. It had no sail and no engine: the only propulsion was the paddler's muscles. In the bow was a cabin little bigger than a coffin, where Doba rested after a dozen or so hours of paddling. He made drinking water from seawater, using a desalinator powered by a solar panel.
The Atlantic for the first time: from Africa to America
He began his first crossing on 26 October 2010 in Dakar, Senegal, and finished on 2 February 2011 in Brazil. He was on the water for close to ninety-nine days. He was the third person in the world, and the first Pole, to cross the Atlantic by kayak on muscle power alone. Right at the end a sea current carried him west, and instead of Fortaleza he reached Acarãu, nearly two hundred kilometres away. He had lost more than ten kilograms.
The Atlantic for the second time: a wrecked rudder and the Bermuda Triangle
The second crossing was the hardest. Doba set out from Lisbon on 5 October 2013, heading straight for Florida. He spent one hundred and sixty-seven days on the water. The rudder broke again and again, and the climax came in a storm on 13 February 2014 in the region of the Bermuda Triangle, less than a month before the finish. Earlier, just past Lisbon, water had got into the locator and the device corroded, while both satellite phones failed. For forty-seven days Doba could not reach anyone.
Headwinds trapped him for more than forty days in the western Atlantic. He pushed forward and was driven back, until at last he had to put in at Bermuda. He set off on the final leg, several hundred miles long, only after a break for repairs. He reached the American shore on 19 April 2014, though a strong wind shifted the landing point.
Sharks, wounds and flying fish
Life on the ocean was not only a fight with the elements. Doba told of dozens of sharks that came to size him up, and one, ready to attack, he had to strike hard with his paddle. The salt water caused painful skin sores on his hands and body. He lived on freeze-dried food, and when a flying fish dropped under the hatch cover at night, he turned it into a fresh fillet.
The Atlantic for the third time and the Adventurer of the Year title
In 2015 the readers of National Geographic magazine chose him Adventurer of the Year, casting a record 521,000 votes for him, the most in the history of the poll.
He organised the third crossing in 2017, paddling from New Jersey to France. He reached Le Conquet, near Brest, on 3 September, after one hundred and ten days. In a straight line the route ran about three thousand nautical miles, but in reality he covered far more. The rudder was damaged again in a storm, and again Doba repaired it himself. When, however, about five hundred miles from Europe the steering system failed badly, the crew of a passing cargo ship, the "Baltic Light", helped him with the repair. That help ended any chance of a Guinness record for an unsupported crossing, but Doba still became the first person to cross the Atlantic by kayak three times. He finished the expedition just before his seventy-first birthday.
The last expedition
Aleksander Doba died on 22 February 2021 on the summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, just after reaching the top. He was seventy-four years old. He climbed to the summit with no sign of altitude sickness, sat down to rest, and lost consciousness. Attempts to revive him failed.