He once became convinced that someone was watching him. He studied the water closely.
“Then I saw it: a huge head, sticking out of the ocean,” he told Canoe & Kayak magazine in 2014. “The whale swam here, and there, all around my kayak. Its 20-meter-long tail was wagging. And then, suddenly, the whale went down and disappeared into the ocean.”
Aleksander Ludwik Doba was born on Sept. 9, 1946, in Swarzedz, Poland. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. His mother, Eugenia (Ilijna) Doba, was a homemaker.
He grew up ice skating on ponds and skiing through forests. His father built him a bicycle from scrap parts, and when he was 15 he rode it across the country.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Doba graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering. He married Gabriela Stucka in 1975, and they settled in a town called Police, where he got a job at a chemical plant. In 1980, his co-workers asked him if he wanted to join their kayaking club, and soon he was spending all his weekends out on the water.
An early escapade involved kayaking on the Baltic Sea at a time when the Communist Party, to discourage defectors, had declared it illegal. When Mr. Doba encountered border patrol soldiers, they told him he was in serious breach of the law.
“I was just paddling down the river,” he explained. “I don’t know how I ended up here.”
Mr. Doba kept chasing adventure. He explored countless Polish rivers, and he amassed records and firsts. In 2010 he started seriously planning to cross the Atlantic, and he designed an unsinkable kayak that contained food lockers and a cabin to sleep in. That October, he paddled from Senegal to Brazil in 99 days.
