The Russians have several, but the largest one that would be similar to ours in terms of operating in ice is the Admiral Makarov academy.
We don't so much view each other as competitors; we are now starting to actually look at working together. I've met with several of their officials, and I intend on going over there this spring.
The Russians are part of this working group that I mentioned, that is at the IMO level now trying to come out with a dedicated series of guidelines. In typical Russian fashion, I suppose, they have their own idea for what should be done. The rest of the working group--Norway, Canada, Denmark, and a host of other nations--have all kind of said, “Okay, that's fine, but you need to incorporate these with the overall goals.”
Our plans for the future are to create a little bit more of a partnership. We're all silos of knowledge--if I can use that term--and we're all looking to achieve the same goal, which is to ensure the safety of the environment, the safety of the people, and the safety of the operation in ice-covered waters or of any operation. We're all doing the same thing.
At this recent meeting we sat down and decided that we will be working together. We intend to; we intend to try to find ways. Their operational considerations are a little bit different from ours. Our main focus right now is dealing with our offshore oil and gas clients, and they're dealing with, in a way, glacial ice, which the groups in Russia are not dealing with. What I mean by glacial ice is the icebergs, the growlers, the ice that comes off the Greenland cap and makes its way down onto the offshore fields. That causes considerable trouble for operations in the east coast oil operations.
We're dealing primarily with those factors now, and as the Russians move into areas where they will come in contact with this kind of situation, they're very interested to gain knowledge from us. And they're doing some things that I'm very interested in. So we both have things that we can trade.