Along with jars of his wifes plum jam, he subsisted on freeze-dried goulash and porridge, chocolate bars and homemade wine. In video footage of the hour before he left, Doba looks wrecked exhausted and on the verge of tears. I was just paddling down the river, he told the border patrol when he inevitably was caught. Doba was ready, Chmielinski suspected, to just drift off into the eternal vastness and go down with his ship. His first crossing was in 2011, from Senegal, West Africa, to Brazil, a 99-day journey. The Polish . His kayak,I rowed varsity crew in highschool and got into kayaking and poling in college. ) so that she could compare it with the condition of her children upon their return. He does love Gabriela, however, and he does not want to cause her more pain. Water trapped in Olos storage lockers short-circuited the electric desalinator. I do not want to be a little gray man. This is a common expression in Poland and a good motto for us all. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. He thought about his dead parents. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. One afternoon Doba parked his Mazda 5 minivan in the lot beside his apartment building, pointed to a nearby forest of Scots pines standing rigid and competing for light and said, amused, Sometimes we have the great adventure of going out there to drink a beer.. However, in Brazil, while running the Amazon in my kayak in 2011, I survived two bouts of rogues with firearms and machetes. 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. Once Poland became a democracy, social structures and attitudes changed. But Doba insisted. Then Doba cut the bent portion off the pin with a hacksaw blade hed brought along and jury-rigged a way to control the rudder with carabiners. Without the wings, the kayak had greater lateral stability and was less sensitive to wind. [7] The departure for the second trip, from Portugal to Florida, turned out to be very abrupt. He once became convinced that someone was watching him. In 1989, he surpassed the record for the most days paddled by a Polish man in a single year. Three times, he paddled 200 to 300 miles, only to get pushed back by the winds and currents.