A resident of Nizhny Tagil, resting on one of the wild beaches of Anapa, swam two kilometers from the shore to save a drowning family.On the beach of Bugazki Spit, a few kilometers from Anapa, a mattress with a mother and a seven-year-old boy was picked up by a wave and carried far from the shore.
The father of the family and several men vacationing on the beach tried to save their loved ones, but they did not even have enough strength to swim to the mattress. Fortunately, Vladislav Smirnov, a 33-year-old coach and teacher of the Olympic sports school «Jupiter» in Nizhny Tagil, who was vacationing in Anapa with his son, heard the cries for help. «The mattress has already turned into a dot on the horizon. He grabbed his glasses and yanked
I swam on my back to navigate along the shore. I remembered the whole course of rescuing drowning at sea. I swam to the men quickly. And the mattress was carried away further. There was a child and a mother. There was no time to think. I rushed on.»
Through strong waves, the swimmer managed to get to the family in trouble only after twenty minutes: he had to constantly change his swimming style and stop for a break. Picking up the mattress, Smirnov began to row back. Only a kilometer from the shore, the rescued mother and son and the exhausted father were picked up by rescuers, but the coach himself decided to swim to the spit on his own-he did not want to catch the eyes of onlookers waiting on the shore.
Later it turned out that mom and son do not know how to swim: at the very shore they lay down on a mattress, and the wind began to quickly carry them further. «I didn’t give my best in any of the training sessions. The moral is simple: there will not always be someone nearby who will risk his life (I was well aware that, most likely, I was sailing in one direction). Take care of your loved ones and don’t do stupid things.»
