'A promise kept': Big Swim participant makes good on pledge to donors

When the Big Swim was cancelled last weekend, Ryan Bradley was already talking about finding another way to make good on what he thought of as an obligation to his donors.

He and Shannon Burt, the kayaker that was goingto cross the Northumberland Strait with him as part of the event, set about finding a route on P.E.I. that he could swim instead.

• Big Swim charity event cancelled due to weather

"Mother Nature didn't co-operate, so the swim got cancelled after thunder and lightning. Not to be rescheduled, so we were kind of left on our own," Bradley said.

Given he fundraised $4,000 for the Brigadoon Children't Camp Society in Nova Scotia, Bradleysaid he wanted to get some closure and do a swim of an equivalent distance as the strait.

Bradley and Burt looked into several routes and decided on Bradley swimming the West River from Bonshaw Bridge to the West River Bridge, just outside of Cornwall, P.E.I. The distance between these points is about 14 kilometres.

"It went really good, I mean the weather was great. It was a nice, sunny day," said Bradley.

Bradley recruited another Island swimmer,ArendteRaa, to make the swim with him,whileBurtkayaked.

'A sense of accomplishment'

Bradley said that while swimming the West River was good, it wasn't what he had been training for since January.

"It was a sense of accomplishment.I still have the desire to do the strait crossing," said Bradley.

He made sure to let his donors know that he had done what he could to make up for the event not going ahead.

"I sent them a note with a few pictures of the day, and just mentioned that it was a promise I made to myself, and a promise that I guess I made to them, and now I feel like it's a promise kept," he said.

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