The Baltic swum. Bartłomiej Kubkowski becomes the first person to cross the sea from Sweden to Poland

Shortly before 20:00 on Sunday 2 August, a man walked onto the beach at Dziwnów having gone almost 55 hours without touching land or a boat. Bartłomiej "Foka" Kubkowski covered the roughly 160 kilometres separating Kåseberga in southern Sweden from the Polish coast, becoming the first person in history to swim the Baltic Sea. It was his fifth attempt and, as he had said before the start, his last.

marine lifestyle worldwide west pomerania swimming marine tourism and recreation news

03 august 2026   |   00:24   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Przemysław Zawalich / na zdjęciu Bartłomiej - Foka - Kubkowski

A fifth attempt, announced as the final one

Kubkowski has been working at this route since 2022. His first attempt, in August of that year, ended after 110 kilometres. In the years that followed the distance grew while the pattern repeated: the sea stopped him once the finish was already within reach.

The fourth attempt, in 2025, was the most painful. Kubkowski spent 53 hours in the water and covered 159 kilometres before his support crew pulled him out 11 kilometres from shore, with his condition deteriorating. His own summary at the time was blunt: Baltic 4-0.

He announced the fifth attempt in March 2026 and called it "Last Dance", explaining that after the fourth he had said never again, but could not sleep with the thought of giving up. He had also previously tried the route in the opposite direction, from Kołobrzeg towards Sweden, before reversing it and deciding to finish in Poland.

The rules that make it a challenge rather than an expedition

The rules for attempts of this kind in ultra open-water swimming are simple and unforgiving. The swimmer may not leave the water at any point. He may not touch the escort vessel, rest against it, and certainly not board it. He may not sleep. Food, drink and medication are handed over directly from the accompanying boat, usually on a pole, to avoid contact.

Throughout, the swimmer is accompanied by a team responsible for navigation, safety, resupply and medical observation. It is the team, not the swimmer, that decides whether to end an attempt, and it was precisely that rule which determined the outcome of Kubkowski's earlier efforts and of Karolina Szczepaniak's attempt last year.

That structure carries an implication rarely mentioned in coverage. In ultra open-water swimming, a competitor several dozen hours into a swim without sleep ceases to be a reliable judge of his own condition. The assessment therefore rests with the people on deck, and their decision is sometimes harder than the swim itself.

Why the Baltic is harder than it looks

The Baltic has no reputation as an extreme body of water, and that is the source of a misunderstanding. For a long-distance swimmer it is an exceptionally ungenerous sea, for several reasons at once.

The first is temperature. Even at the height of summer, water in the open sea rarely exceeds twenty degrees, and after a night, or with upwelling, it can drop several degrees within hours. Over dozens of hours of immersion the body loses heat continuously, with no possibility of warming up, since leaving the water ends the attempt.

The second is the sea state. The Baltic is a shallow, enclosed sea, so its waves are short and steep, unlike the long ocean swell. For a swimmer this means constant disruption to breathing rhythm and stroke, particularly in a beam sea, which both Kubkowski and Szczepaniak have cited during previous attempts.

The third is current. On this route it can undo hours of effort, pushing the swimmer off track and forcing extra distance that never appears on a straight-line counter.

The fourth is sleep deprivation. On a crossing lasting more than two days, a swimmer goes through two nights without sleep, or three on longer attempts, with disturbances to orientation and perception that become a safety problem in the water rather than merely a discomfort.

How the crossing unfolded

Kubkowski set off from Kåseberga on Friday 31 July. Around 22 hours in he was holding a pace above three kilometres per hour, which over this distance is a strong figure. By the evening of 1 August, roughly 35 hours in, he had passed the hundred-kilometre mark. On Sunday morning fewer than thirty kilometres remained, and that evening, after close to 55 hours of continuous swimming, he reached Dziwnów.

The scale of the result becomes clear only in comparison. The previous furthest documented Baltic swim was Sebastian Karaś's crossing of over a hundred kilometres from Kołobrzeg to Bornholm in 2017. Kubkowski's route was half as long again and ran across the sea rather than along it.

This is not his first record. At the swimming pool in Koszalin he set a world record for 24-hour swimming, completing 4,143 lengths of a 25-metre pool, or 103.58 kilometres.

More than sport

The crossing was tied from the outset to a fundraiser for the Cancer Fighters Foundation, which supports children and young people with cancer. The counter started with the swim, stood at close to 158,000 złoty on Sunday morning, and approached half a million once he reached shore.

That mechanism is the rule rather than the exception in Polish ultra sport. The live stream, the distance counter and the donation counter work together, and the longer the crossing lasts, the wider the reach. Paradoxically, the hours of the swimmer's deepest crisis are also the hours in which the campaign works hardest.

There are two of them out there

Kubkowski was not swimming alone. At almost the same moment, at around 13:15 on 31 July, Karolina Szczepaniak set off from the same Kåseberga. A two-time Olympian, at Beijing and London, and a multiple Polish national medallist, she is heading for Pobierowo on a slightly longer route, reported variously at between 160 and 172 kilometres.

This is her second attempt. In 2025 she swam in the opposite direction, from Poland towards Sweden, spending over 57 hours in the water and covering more than 142 kilometres, setting the record for the longest distance swum in the Baltic by a woman. Her team ended that attempt on safety grounds. This year she deliberately reversed the direction in order to finish in Poland.

Her ultra record stands regardless of how this crossing ends. In February 2025 she set a Guinness record by swimming continuously for 48 hours and covering 149 kilometres. In March 2026, preparing for this year's attempt, she swam without a break for 72 hours.

Her swim, too, combines sport with fundraising. Szczepaniak is raising money for the treatment and rehabilitation of a fourteen-year-old boy who suffered a serious spinal injury with cord damage in late June after a dive into a swimming pool. The original target of 200,000 złoty was exceeded while she was still in the water.

At the time of writing, Karolina Szczepaniak was still swimming. At 21:40 on Sunday she had 114 kilometres behind her, after more than fifty hours in the water. That makes this crossing longer than last year's, in tougher conditions reported by her team: beam seas, wind and cold. The outcome of her attempt will be known after this edition closes.

What remains

For the Baltic, a sea usually discussed in terms of shipping, fisheries and security, this opens a new chapter. A body of water long regarded as too cold and too capricious for a swim has now been crossed, over a distance comparable to the hardest open-water routes anywhere.

There is also a dimension that tends to be pushed to the margins of this story, and it matters no less than the record. Both swimmers were swimming for someone specific: Kubkowski for the children supported by Cancer Fighters, Szczepaniak for a fourteen-year-old boy in rehabilitation. Both fundraisers passed their targets before the swimmers reached shore, and together they amount to hundreds of thousands of złoty going towards treatment and recovery. That is the part of the result which will outlast the records once they are broken.

And there is a less spectacular point that maritime readers will recognise at once. Behind one swimmer's result sit dozens of hours of work by an escort crew: navigation through shifting currents, holding station on the swimmer, observation, and readiness to recover him from the water at any moment. Records in this discipline are set single-handed only on paper.

Buy us a coffee, and we’ll invest in great maritime journalism! Support Gazeta Morska and help us sail forward – click here!

Bartłomiej Kubkowski przepłynął Bałtyk wpław pierwszy człowiek przepłynął Bałtyk Kåseberga Dziwnów 160 km wpław Karolina Szczepaniak Bałtyk wpław 2026 Ultra Baltic Swim rekord

comments

---

enter content

COMMENT

nick

Add the first comment