Post by kaima on Apr 23, 2018 12:03:14 GMT -7
SEA
BY ELIZABETH WEIL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOAKIM ESKILDSEN
MARCH 22, 2018
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. He’d been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. So he stayed on the water nearly another week, in the one-meter-wide boat where he’d endured towering waves, in the coffinlike cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved ones’ patience in order to be lonely, naked and afraid. Then he paddled to the French shore.
KAYAKING THE OCEAN:
FIRST EXPEDITION
Kayaking is an absurd form of long-distance ocean travel. All the big muscles in the body are useless. “A real katorga,” says Doba, who is Polish — katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. But by katorga, Doba does not mean an activity he does not wish to do. What most of us experience as suffering he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. Among Doba’s 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. 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 had promised himself he would be tougher than all that.
Doba maintains that his need to cross the Atlantic in a kayak did not originate within him. “With my hand on my heart, it wasn’t my idea,” Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. (Doba doesn’t speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) “I was infected with a virus.” In 2003, when he was already the most seasoned kayaker in Poland, a Polish professor approached him to get advice on his quest to kayak across the Baltic Sea. 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. The trip was a fiasco. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach.
Doba flew back to Poland; returned to his hometown, Police, in the country’s northwest, where he had been managing maintenance and repairs at an enormous chemical factory; and swore off kayaking with a partner ever again. Then Doba sketched out a design for a new boat that could make the trip. 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. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Szczecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht-builder named Andrzej Arminski. Arminski agreed to build the boat, and in spring of 2010, Olo, as Doba named his kayak — after his own nickname, Olek — was complete. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again.
ALEKSANDER DOBA IN THE ATLANTIC BEFORE ARRIVING IN FLORIDA IN APRIL 2014.
PIOTR CHMIELINSKI
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. Doba’s goal was to go continent to continent between the mainlands, from Senegal to Brazil, unsupported. This time Doba’s trip was far more successful, which is not to say it was pleasant. The weather was disgusting — humid and hot. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldn’t, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. He kept no schedule. “I am not German — always 9 a.m. paddle,” he explained. “I am Polish. I paddle when I would like.” His skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, including blisters in his armpits and groin. His eyes blew up with conjunctivitis. His fingernails and toenails just about peeled off. His clothes, permeated with salt, refused to dry. The fabric smelled horrendous and aggravated his skin, so he abandoned clothes.
Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. The primary challenge is not physical. Doba describes the tedium as a form of dementia: “Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of repetitions. The brain is removed from the process.” Alone at sea without his hearing aids, Doba joked, he grew so disoriented that he started shouting at himself “so that I could hear.” (Doba is fairly deaf but didn’t bring the aids along because they’re expensive and not waterproof, and there was no one to talk to anyway.) 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. He was assaulted by hailstorms of flying fish. “Do you know how fast they go?” he said. “This does not feel good.”
When he couldn’t 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. He thought about his dead parents. 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. He did have a satellite phone, and he texted with Arminski, who, as his trip navigator, sent a regular forecast for wind and weather. Doba also called his wife, twice. But after she got the bill for $500, she says, “the desire to talk” decreased.
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. (He ate all the meat options first.) He also snacked on dried fruit and his wife’s plum jam, but he ran out of that halfway across the ocean. Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, “I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland.” He lost 45 pounds. Still, the trip was perfect. Ninety-nine days after leaving Senegal, Doba arrived in Brazil. He was greeted by one journalist and the Polish ambassador. Nobody cares if you cross the Atlantic in a kayak. The fact that Doba knows this is clear in his eyes. In photos from the ends of his trips, he looks ecstatic and feral, in the best possible sense, intrinsically wild and free.
CONSECUTIVE DAYS AT SEA IN 2017: 110.
BOTTLES OF SUNSCREEN TAKEN ON ONE TRIP: 7.
LITERS OF HOMEMADE WINE: 3.
MOST POUNDS LOST ON A TRIP: 45.
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.
“The devil, a German man, a Frenchman and a Polish man are all in a hot-air balloon,” Wojciechowska said. “They are falling, falling — a catastrophe is about to happen. So the devil says to the German man: ‘You must jump. This is an order.’ And the German man jumps.
“Then the devil says to the Frenchman, ‘You must jump.’ The Frenchman says, ‘What does this mean?’
“The devil says, ‘It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern.’ So the Frenchman jumps.
DOBA IN LISBON IN OCTOBER 2013, DEMONSTRATING HOW HE WOULD LIVE ABOARD HIS KAYAK.
RICARDO BRAVO
“Then the devil gets to the Polish man.” He tries the reasons he used on the German and French men, without success. “ ‘Shoot,’ the devil says. ‘I know you will not jump.’ And the Polish man jumps.”
Wojciechowska looked at me squarely, to make sure I understood. “The more you don’t believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. If you aren’t willing to suffer, you can do nothing. You can sit and die. This is the only one thing you can do.”
Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. You can be made small by life or rage against it. “Nie chce byc malym szarym czlowiekiem,” he told me. “I do not want to be a little gray man.” This is a common expression in Poland — and a good motto for us all.
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. The whole nation was starving. Previous generations had not fared better. Doba’s maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. His maternal grandmother was sent to Siberia. Their three sons, Doba’s uncles, disappeared.
The remainder of the article, with maps, is at
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-kayaking-across-ocean-at-70.html
BY ELIZABETH WEIL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOAKIM ESKILDSEN
MARCH 22, 2018
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. He’d been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. So he stayed on the water nearly another week, in the one-meter-wide boat where he’d endured towering waves, in the coffinlike cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved ones’ patience in order to be lonely, naked and afraid. Then he paddled to the French shore.
KAYAKING THE OCEAN:
FIRST EXPEDITION
Kayaking is an absurd form of long-distance ocean travel. All the big muscles in the body are useless. “A real katorga,” says Doba, who is Polish — katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. But by katorga, Doba does not mean an activity he does not wish to do. What most of us experience as suffering he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. Among Doba’s 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. 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 had promised himself he would be tougher than all that.
Doba maintains that his need to cross the Atlantic in a kayak did not originate within him. “With my hand on my heart, it wasn’t my idea,” Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. (Doba doesn’t speak much English, so we communicated through a translator.) “I was infected with a virus.” In 2003, when he was already the most seasoned kayaker in Poland, a Polish professor approached him to get advice on his quest to kayak across the Baltic Sea. 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. The trip was a fiasco. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach.
Doba flew back to Poland; returned to his hometown, Police, in the country’s northwest, where he had been managing maintenance and repairs at an enormous chemical factory; and swore off kayaking with a partner ever again. Then Doba sketched out a design for a new boat that could make the trip. 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. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Szczecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht-builder named Andrzej Arminski. Arminski agreed to build the boat, and in spring of 2010, Olo, as Doba named his kayak — after his own nickname, Olek — was complete. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again.
ALEKSANDER DOBA IN THE ATLANTIC BEFORE ARRIVING IN FLORIDA IN APRIL 2014.
PIOTR CHMIELINSKI
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. Doba’s goal was to go continent to continent between the mainlands, from Senegal to Brazil, unsupported. This time Doba’s trip was far more successful, which is not to say it was pleasant. The weather was disgusting — humid and hot. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldn’t, so he tried to paddle during the day and nearly got sunstroke. He kept no schedule. “I am not German — always 9 a.m. paddle,” he explained. “I am Polish. I paddle when I would like.” His skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, including blisters in his armpits and groin. His eyes blew up with conjunctivitis. His fingernails and toenails just about peeled off. His clothes, permeated with salt, refused to dry. The fabric smelled horrendous and aggravated his skin, so he abandoned clothes.
Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. The primary challenge is not physical. Doba describes the tedium as a form of dementia: “Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of repetitions. The brain is removed from the process.” Alone at sea without his hearing aids, Doba joked, he grew so disoriented that he started shouting at himself “so that I could hear.” (Doba is fairly deaf but didn’t bring the aids along because they’re expensive and not waterproof, and there was no one to talk to anyway.) 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. He was assaulted by hailstorms of flying fish. “Do you know how fast they go?” he said. “This does not feel good.”
When he couldn’t 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. He thought about his dead parents. 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. He did have a satellite phone, and he texted with Arminski, who, as his trip navigator, sent a regular forecast for wind and weather. Doba also called his wife, twice. But after she got the bill for $500, she says, “the desire to talk” decreased.
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. (He ate all the meat options first.) He also snacked on dried fruit and his wife’s plum jam, but he ran out of that halfway across the ocean. Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, “I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland.” He lost 45 pounds. Still, the trip was perfect. Ninety-nine days after leaving Senegal, Doba arrived in Brazil. He was greeted by one journalist and the Polish ambassador. Nobody cares if you cross the Atlantic in a kayak. The fact that Doba knows this is clear in his eyes. In photos from the ends of his trips, he looks ecstatic and feral, in the best possible sense, intrinsically wild and free.
CONSECUTIVE DAYS AT SEA IN 2017: 110.
BOTTLES OF SUNSCREEN TAKEN ON ONE TRIP: 7.
LITERS OF HOMEMADE WINE: 3.
MOST POUNDS LOST ON A TRIP: 45.
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.
“The devil, a German man, a Frenchman and a Polish man are all in a hot-air balloon,” Wojciechowska said. “They are falling, falling — a catastrophe is about to happen. So the devil says to the German man: ‘You must jump. This is an order.’ And the German man jumps.
“Then the devil says to the Frenchman, ‘You must jump.’ The Frenchman says, ‘What does this mean?’
“The devil says, ‘It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern.’ So the Frenchman jumps.
DOBA IN LISBON IN OCTOBER 2013, DEMONSTRATING HOW HE WOULD LIVE ABOARD HIS KAYAK.
RICARDO BRAVO
“Then the devil gets to the Polish man.” He tries the reasons he used on the German and French men, without success. “ ‘Shoot,’ the devil says. ‘I know you will not jump.’ And the Polish man jumps.”
Wojciechowska looked at me squarely, to make sure I understood. “The more you don’t believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. If you aren’t willing to suffer, you can do nothing. You can sit and die. This is the only one thing you can do.”
Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. You can be made small by life or rage against it. “Nie chce byc malym szarym czlowiekiem,” he told me. “I do not want to be a little gray man.” This is a common expression in Poland — and a good motto for us all.
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. The whole nation was starving. Previous generations had not fared better. Doba’s maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. His maternal grandmother was sent to Siberia. Their three sons, Doba’s uncles, disappeared.
The remainder of the article, with maps, is at
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-kayaking-across-ocean-at-70.html