Aleksander Doba died late last month at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 74. He will be best remembered as an irrepressible, record-setting kayaker who paddled across the Atlantic three times while in his 60s and 70s.

Born in 1946, in Swarzęd, Poland, near the city of Poznań, Doba got into kayaking relatively late, at 34.

And it wasn’t until he was 65, in 2010, that he would embark on the first in a series of three journeys across the Atlantic Ocean, earning Doba, a retired engineer, the nickname the “pensioner adventurer”.

Doba’s first trans-Atlantic crossing from Senegal to Brazil took him from October 2010 to February 2011; the second from Portugal to US shores from October 2013 to April 2014. His third voyage in 2017, at the age of 70, was from the US to France and took 111 days.

Doba’s three daring voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, becoming the oldest person to kayak across the Atlantic. In 2015, Doba was National Geographic’s People Choice Adventurer of the year. His feats made him a national hero in Poland.

According to his son Czeslaw,  Aleksander Doba’s death was caused by asphyxia resulting from high-altitude pulmonary edema. Explorersweb reports that as Doba and his two guides reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, Doba sat down to rest for a moment. He then lost consciousness. Efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he died shortly afterward.

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.