RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, On the evening of May 11, 2011, veteran sailor Peter Kovats and two friends sailed from Montrose Harbor onto Lake Michigan to celebrate his sixty-second birthday; and
WHEREAS, While monitoring the weather reports from a yacht club on shore, Peter's wife, Mary, contacted her husband to warn him that a fast-moving storm was approaching from the west; and
WHEREAS, As darkness fell and a violent squall set in, Mary Kovats watched as a stream of boats returned to the harbor, but not the nineteen foot Peter Pan, captained by her husband; and
WHEREAS, Mary Kovats became increasingly worried when she was unable to reach any of the men via cell-phone and immediately decided to follow her instincts; and
WHEREAS, Mary Kovats, a Rear Commodore for the Chicago Corinthian Yacht Club and an experienced sailor in her own right, quickly commandeered a power boat and enlisted the help of two fellow yacht club members, Jacob Karlin and David Stix; and
WHEREAS, Remaining calm, but acting with great dispatch, the trio embarked on a hastily-assembled search and rescue mission and fought their way out of the harbor into a hailstorm of buffeting winds, high waves and lashing rains; and
WHEREAS, Approximately a mile off Irving Park Road, Mary Kovats came upon her husband's boat which was found overturned and empty; and
WHEREAS, Searching hundreds of yards farther out into the darkness, Mary Kovats finally located the three men who had been floating in the thirty-to-forty-degree water and had begun to suffer from hypothermia; and
WHEREAS, Fire Department officials estimate the men had been in the water for forty-five minutes and would have perished in another thirty minutes; and
WHEREAS, Assisted by her fellow yacht club members, Mary Kovats pulled her half-conscious husband and crewmates from the frigid water and into the safety of the motor boat; and
WHEREAS, Mary Kovats, a public school teacher and a daughter of the late Chicago Tribune reporter and news editor Denis Q...
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