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Jack Bright
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Alexandr Brylin, Oleg Dokuchaev, and everyone in
Russia and around the world who was a part of this. Special
thanks to my colleagues at 1.PKO winter swimming club in
Prague and of course my parents Les and Jane who have
always been there for me.
the main thing was that we had it. But still Irtysh proved
difficult to find. Finally after much work with GPS, radar,
compass and radio we took a course of w110 which led us
to Irtysh. I heard Alex say to Leonid in Russian Priama
kurz na karebla, (go straight on this course theres the
ship). Sure enough a few seconds later out of the white
nothingness appeared a shape and that shape proved to be
Irtysh, an amazing sight. I said out loud a few times,
Irtysh, and started to love that ship more than ever, it now
took on a female form and at that moment I would go as far
as to say it was like a goddess, saving us from the clutches
of the Bering Sea. All of us were pretty shaken up by this. I
went straight to find Alex who had run off to his cabin to
get his GPS! We exchanged some words and I asked him
why he didnt have his GPS with him. He replied that he
had forgotten. That was fair enough of course because
mistakes happen all the time in all walks of life in all
situations. The only thing that got on my nerves was that he
said he wanted to help James. My answer to this was that
helping James would have been to have GPS, as our team
had James under control, had a system for swimming with
James. I was annoyed because my thoughts about safety
when swimming with James were being proved right. So
much attention on him and then you forgot about other
things such as other swimmers or in this case navigation.
James was a big strong man and a great swimmer, his only
problem was that he couldnt see. He didnt need a fanfare
he just needed to swim and some basic help with logistics
which was taken care of mostly by Craig. This time we had
gotten away with it. At this point it is worth me saying that
Alexandr Jakovlev is a good friend of mine and a very
capable sailor, navigator and swimmer. He fearlessly spent
many hours in the water and I didnt in any way feel any
real anger at him for this small error. As I said it is a fact of
life that things go wrong, the important thing is to learn
from experience and move on, which we did. We went to
the bridge to speak with Oleg Dokuchaev and others about
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