Water/Swimming Safety

Tuesday, May 25th, 2021

Topic: Water Safety

Presenter: Jim “The Shark” Dreyer, President of Event Marketing Enterprises, Inc.

Location: Virtual (or Kent District Library-Grandville Branch)

Time: 8:00 to 9:00 AM

Location: If F2F, then 4055 Maple St. SW, Grandville, MI 49418

Cost: $15.00

Jim Dreyer was named a “Superhuman” when he appeared on the History Channel’s popular TV series , Stan Lee’s Superhumans on August 6, 2014. The segment, entitled “The Human Tugboat,” featured Dreyer successfully towing a 27-ton ferry across Newport beach Harbor in an astonishing feat of strength. Jim now has 19 world records.

Jim’s TV series comes on the heels of his August 5-7, 2003 event, in which he pulled a half-ton of bricks for 51 hours while swimming 22 miles alone across Lake St. Clair to Detroit, in support of Habitat for Humanity. He towed a full ton of bricks for the first 18 hours of the swim before losing half his load in rough seas. As the first to combine a world record feat of strength with distance swimming, Jim Dreyer has coined the term “strength swimming.”

Jim first partnered with Habitat for Humanity in 2012, when he kayaked across the U.S. from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. After completing the expedition, he helped build a Habitat home in the hurricane-stricken area of New Orleans.

In 1998, just two years after learning how to swim, Jim started his ultra-marathon career with a 65-mile swim across Lake Michigan. He went on to become the first to set record swimming across all five Great Lakes, in a series benefiting the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.

Jim also holds a black belt in Tae-Kwon-Do, and he has been an accomplished semi-professional baseball player, cross-country skier and just missed the mark in the U.S. Olympic team as a snowshoe competitor.

Jim was appointed by Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to the Mentor Michigan Leadership Council from 2006-2010. During his term, he founded and led the Adventures in Mentoring (AIM) program. AIM matches court-involved youth with mentors and trains them in wilderness survival and adventure racing to develop self-confidence and interpersonal life skills.

The open water, Jim’s greatest fear since childhood near-drowning, has become the playing field for much of his unprecedented athletic success. Controlling fear and harnessing “Cornerstone Strength in the face of Burden” is the subject of his inspirational presentations on the speaker’s circuit.

Now known as “the Shark,” Jim Dreyer has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, and in 2015 founded and directed the Mighty Mac Swim, ranked the 12th highest grossing charity swim in world history…in just its first year!

Despite being a super human, safety cannot take a backseat. Jim will discuss swimming safety and having the right mind set when undergoing training and doing the real feat.