In the summer of 2009, sixty-two-year-old Aleksander Doba climbed into a folding kayak and, after forty-one days, closed the loop around Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. He paddled almost two thousand kilometres along its shores and was the first Pole to do so. For most people a trip like that would be the achievement of a lifetime. For Doba it was one of many that were barely spoken of at home, because real fame – and only a few years before his death – came to him from the ocean.
An engineer from Police
Doba was not a professional athlete or a professional traveller. He graduated from the Poznań University of Technology, spent his entire working life at the Police Chemical Works near Szczecin, and retired from there. He took up the kayak fairly late, around 1980, in the Alchemik Police club and in Pluskon of Szczecin, but he quickly earned the gold badge for kayak touring, one of only a handful in the country.
This is an important mark on the biography: everything that came later, Doba did outside his job, after hours and during his holidays, and he only began his great expeditions in earnest in retirement, at an age when most people had long since left the water. The kayak was, for him, a way of living.
The diagonal of Poland and the whole Vistula
In April 1989 he paddled across Poland on the diagonal, from Przemyśl to Świnoujście, one thousand one hundred and eighty-nine kilometres in thirteen days. But that was only the start of his best season: over the course of that same year he set a record for the number of kilometres paddled by kayak, more than five thousand, most of them on routes new to him, spending one hundred and eight days on the water. Two years later, in 1991, he became the first kayaker to run the whole Vistula and the Polish stretch of the borders, circling the country along its rivers and coast.
Before Doba faced the ocean, he came to know Poland's water as few others did. He paddled it in every direction, in every season, thoroughly enough that the country ran out of new rivers for him.
Around the Baltic
In 1999 he took on something far bigger. From 21 June to 9 September he circled the Baltic solo, setting out from Police and returning to Police after eighty days. Four thousand two hundred and twenty-seven kilometres, along the shores of more than a dozen countries: past Bornholm, the Swedish coast, Stockholm, the Åland Islands, Finland, Tallinn, Riga, Lithuania, Kaliningrad and back through Gdańsk and the Polish ports. A sea kayak on open water is an entirely different element from a river: what counts is the wind, the wave off the beam and long hours with nowhere safe to land.
A year later, in 2000, he pushed still further north. From Police to Narvik, far beyond the Arctic Circle, five thousand three hundred and sixty-nine kilometres in one hundred and one days, along the coasts of Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the whole fjord-ragged length of Norway.
Baikal
Baikal in 2009 was an expedition of a different kind. It was not about the distance between two points, but about circling the lake along its shoreline, in a folding kayak that could be flown to Siberia. One thousand nine hundred and fifty-four kilometres and forty-one days along the shores of a body of water that holds a fifth of the world's fresh water and can turn from a mirror into a sea in a matter of minutes. Earlier, in 2008, Doba had also tried to cross the English Channel, but that attempt was cut short by a storm.
A school before the ocean
Only after all those routes, at the age of sixty-four, did Doba set out for the first time across the Atlantic. The years on the Vistula, on the Baltic and on Baikal taught him solitude on the water, planning supplies for weeks and enduring day after day in one position, with no land on the horizon. The three ocean crossings that brought him world fame were the consequence of those twenty years, not their beginning.