“Now I am in the silent zone.”

March 23, 2018 1:06 AM

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. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants.

Alone at Sea by Elizabeth Weil (SL NYT)

(Previously)

posted by lesser weasel (12 comments total)

An amazing and inspirational person. I doubt if I will ever do anything that can even hold a candle to his accomplishments, but it's always good to hear stories of what people are actually capable of. People in my life think I'm slightly crazy because I'll hike up a 4,000 foot mountain in the winter; that's pretty tame stuff compared to kayaking solo across the Atlantic. If this guy can do what he did, I can certainly keep doing what I'm doing now, and I'm clearly nowhere near the limit of what I can do if I work at it and keep pushing. I hope I'm still climbing mountains at 70. (I hope I have a beard like that, too.)

I also appreciate the apparent lack of corporate sponsorship here. (Unless I missed something; I'll admit I'm only halfway through, I keep getting bored by all the "human interest" biographic stuff, I want to hear more about the kayaking!) So many extreme accomplishments these days seem to come with the help of big corporations and big money that give people the very best gear and the very best training that money can buy, and which allow the athletes to devote themselves 24/7 to their goal in exchange for turning them into essentially moving billboards and PR reps. This guy is a maintenance foreman at a chemical plant. He designed his own kayak and had a boatbuilder make it for him. He trained according to his own theories and paddled according to his own schedule. He did not have a support boat following him the whole way, with a professional film crew to document his journey for Epic's or Red Bull's social media feed and divers on board to fish him out if he got hurt or decided to give up.

This is truly his own accomplishment. This dude is way more intense than I will ever be, and maybe it's good that not many people are quite this intense. But I'm glad that some of us are, and I look up to them. Mr. Doba can be proud of what he's done.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:18 AM on March 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

"Let's see... technically, I could paddle from Newfoundland to Ireland and call it a crossing. But... nah... boring. Need to level up. New Jersey to France."
posted by clawsoon at 6:43 AM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also I like this guy's approach to gear. Hearing aids not waterproof? Leave 'em behind, there's nobody to talk to anyway. Clothes unbearably nasty from salt and sweat? Fuck it, guess I'm kayaking naked now. Right on, Mr. Doba.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:53 AM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, and he actually made it to England first, but turned away a few hundred feet from shore and paddled on for weeks more because France was the goal. That takes some serious willpower, after spending months alone in a kayak in the middle of the ocean. It's not as if anyone would have blamed him had he stopped there; it would still have been an incredible accomplishment. But he accepted the additional weeks of avoidable hardship and finished what he had originally set out to do.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:59 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

The article describes a point in his second trip where he spent six weeks paddling in circles in the Bermuda Triangle because of a rudder failure before finally going to shore to make the repair. To stick with it that long before seeking help is a special level of stubbornness.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:05 AM on March 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

From the previously, about an earlier trip: "Since apparently kayaking across the Atlantic just wasn't enough of a challenge otherwise, he did the trip against the goddamn current."

Next time, though, I'd bring a couple of spare rudders.
posted by clawsoon at 7:39 AM on March 23, 2018

I also appreciated that his wife makes him keep his kayaking gear out on the balcony, because it smells. Life is full of compromises even for the Mr. Dobas of this world.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:56 AM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sorry for the serial commenting, but there's way too much good stuff here:

Doba returned to Police to a hero’s welcome and 14 months later flew to Washington to receive an award from the National Geographic Society as the 2015 People’s Choice Adventurer of the Year. 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.

😍
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:16 AM on March 23, 2018 [6 favorites]

He really sounds like a very special person.
posted by The Toad at 8:57 AM on March 23, 2018

He was unaccustomed to wearing pants.

I've been unemployed for over two years. Me too.
posted by elsietheeel at 9:00 AM on March 23, 2018 [5 favorites]

I am the unlikely target audience for pieces like this, and this one is just perfection. I'm still in the early paragraphs but wanted to say that this:

'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. I was not in a great state. 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. But still, I was so happy I’d gotten away. I’d been feeling buried, by stuff exactly as predictable as you’d imagine for a working mother of two kids. (Honestly, you don’t need the details.) Wojciechowska drank a double cappuccino and told me that she’d been engaged five times but never married — she felt it would be impossible to follow her dreams with a husband. She also left her daughter at age 8 months to go climb a mountain in Antarctica because she was trying to complete the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each continent, and achieving that goal, at that time, felt like a matter of life or death. She felt bad about it, she said, and she felt judged, but here we were, weren’t we? Then she sat me down at a nearby restaurant, ordered pierogies and borscht and told me a joke."

is one of the best paragraphs I've read in a long time.
posted by stellaluna at 12:08 PM on March 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

I would watch the hell out of a show called "Woman at the End of the World."
posted by filthy_prescriptivist at 6:13 PM on March 23, 2018