3. HUMAN FACTOR

Four boats takes 16 pilots, same number of technicians and “gasoline crew”, plus a group of support… The whole is more then 50 people. It’s not a “small” group at all….

The pilots of boat “Akula” (№5) in the class 4 are professionals. Valerii Starokozjev, Alexei Sinitsyn, Vadim Ushakov, and Sergei Fedorko - famous names in water motor sport.

The team of boat YAMARAN B640R (the traditional #7) - "advanced users". Champions of Russia 2001 year Andrei Gerashenko, Dmitri Sandler ("Petroset-Bolshoi") and Konstantin Dmitriev ("Aquatrade"). Igor Boldin - a big enthusiast of varied extreme amusements.

Teams of boats in the class 1 - an alliance of the youth and experience. Repeated Champion of Russia Alexander Smyrnov ("Petroset-Bolshoi"), trainer Jurii Smyrnov, German Belousov, Eugeni Savchenco, Alexei Kostromin, Alexei Piatygin, Sergei Condratiev and Anatoly Bykov - all the members of "YAMARAN" Sport Club.

4. PREPARATION

The most difficult was preparing the boats of class 4. For a week of serious work, with considerable help of Mr. Tsunamoto of Yamaha Motor Japan, we managed to obtain a stable run of boat YAMARAN B640R on speed up to 110 kilometres per hour.

Boat “Akula” was ready to put on water just in 2 days before the race. In the test drives is reveal fault of fuel system of the boat, on repairing of which we spent all remaining time, so we can’t prepare this boat as well as we wish.

Technical control of the boats at Friday morning beyond the race lasted several hours. The whole night before the race was spent on eliminating problems fixed by the control, so at Saturday - a day of beginning of the race - a crew of mechanical engineers looked "powerfully tire, but not beaten". Recurrent technical commission was held at Saturday morning, and, finally, permission for the boats participation was received.