04/08/2026
Just read it 💜 Yes you CAN do it. “Keep on swimming” EQALL does that too, perhaps with you? 09.09. Official Social Impact Startup Launch Signup 👉🏻 eqallgroup.com 🇺🇸🌎🇪🇺 For a more conscious world…
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Dorottya Eva Kiss
Az Élet Meséi
Bartłomiej Kubkowski first attempted to swim across the Baltic Sea in 2021. He made it 71 miles (115 kilometers) before the sea stopped him. He came back in 2022 and got 73 miles (117 kilometers). In 2023, snow fell on him in mid-August and his team pulled him out at 81 miles (130 kilometers). In 2025, his fourth attempt, he swam for over 52 hours and made it 99 miles (159 kilometers), just 7 miles (11 kilometers) from the Polish coast, before exhaustion and deteriorating conditions forced him out of the water.
Across four failed attempts, he had swum 324 miles (521 kilometers) of the Baltic Sea without ever reaching Poland.
He came back in 2026.
On Friday, July 31, Kubkowski entered the water at Kåseberga on the southern coast of Sweden. The rules were simple and brutal: no sleeping, no touching the support boat at any point, no stopping. Food and fluids were passed to him on a pole while he kept swimming. He had to reach the beach in Dziwnów, Poland, under his own power and remain standing without assistance for the achievement to count.
For the first day, he swam. For the second day, he swam. After two consecutive nights without sleep, the hallucinations started. His team later described moments when he lost touch with reality entirely, his mind going somewhere else while his body kept pulling stroke after stroke through cold Baltic water.
He kept going.
After 56 hours and 100 miles (160 kilometers), Kubkowski clambered onto the beach at Dziwnów. Hundreds of people were waiting. He walked out of the water unaided, visibly destroyed, and stood on Polish soil for the first time since he had left it years earlier chasing this goal.
He was the first person in history to swim across the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Poland.
The swim raised over $200,000 for Cancer Fighters, a foundation supporting children with cancer.
