Tony Bullimore
Yachtsman who made headlines after surviving four days in freezing seas in an upturned boat
TONY BULLIMORE, who has died aged 79, was, if not Britain’s greatest singlehanded yachtsman of modern times, certainly the most reckless; his rescue from the icy ocean between Australia and Antarctica in 1997 made headlines around the world, even though there were those who subsequently suggested that he may have been as much the victim of media manipulation as of the mountainous seas of the Southern Ocean.
Bullimore was taken from the wreckage of his 60ft schooner Exide Challenger less than 900 miles off the coast of Antarctica in January 1997 while competing in a single-handed round-the-world race.
Rescuers found the vessel’s upturned carbon-fibre hull adrift in the Southern Ocean and assumed that Bullimore himself had been lost; in fact, he had hidden in a makeshift hammock inside the stricken boat for four days, with water pouring in through a smashed window as a storm raged outside.
After one of the most dramatic of modern sea rescues, Bullimore attributed his survival to “sheer determination, a little water, a little chocolate”. Snatched from certain death, Bullimore was pounced on by various agents, managers and hustlers, all anxious to capitalise on his extraordinary ordeal and even more extraordinary deliverance; much money was talked about when it came to Bullimore recalling which brand of chocolate he had gnawed at as he abandoned himself to what he assumed would be his fate.
Bullimore was once described as a short, power-packed jack-in-the-box, and his taste for adventure had remained undimmed since he sailed to Cape Town at the age of 18. In a career spanning half a century, he sailed up the Congo, made his first transatlantic crossing at the age of 38, and had subsequently notched up nearly 30 such voyages.
Although usually described as a “businessman”, Bullimore was more of a wheeler-dealer; he opened Bristol’s first nightclub for black people, the Bamboo Club, ran an exhibition centre which burned down, helped to promote Muhammad Ali on a visit to Britain and traded in all kinds of commodities and manufactured goods in the Far East, Middle East and Russia. Bullimore’s critics defined him as morally ambiguous.
He took up sailing comparatively late, in his mid-20s. Technically, he was no expert; his rivals derided his oddly designed multi-hulled craft, but he displayed the kind of batty tenacity that commended him to a constituency far beyond the yachting fraternity, and which earned him the inevitable tabloid tag “Bulldog Bullimore”.
He came to public prominence when he tried to become the first British sailor for 20 years to win the Single-handed Transatlantic Race, famously won by Sir Francis Chichester in 1960, the year in which Bullimore had first taken the helm of a multihull, when he delivered a 26-footer from Essex to Bristol.
In 1974 he competed in the Round Britain Race with Gancia Girl, formerly Toria, which was lost in the 1976 Single-handed Transatlantic Race. Bullimore was forced to abandon the yacht in mid-atlantic after a fire, and he was rescued from a his life raft by a tanker.
Bullimore first came to wider public notice in 1985 when he and his designer and builder Nigel Irens won the Round Britain Race in their 60ft trimaran Apricot. Both men were named Yachtsmen of the Year in 1986, when Apricot finished third in the 3,000-mile Carlsberg Transatlantic race from Plymouth to Newport, Rhode Island. Bullimore crossed the finishing line in just under 151⁄2 days, despite colliding with a whale in mid-atlantic, resulting in the loss of the bottom nine feet of Apricot’s 17-foot centreboard.
The £200,000 vessel was wrecked the following November at the start of a race from St Malo to Guadeloupe when she ran on to rocks at the entrance to Brest harbour; Bullimore, the only person on board, managed to scramble ashore.
The trimaran’s replacement, the Spirit of Apricot, built at a cost of £400,000, made her debut 18 months later, in April 1988. But Bullimore’s hopes of winning that year’s Singlehanded Transatlantic Race were dashed the following November when the organisers imposed a nine per cent penalty on his elapsed time during his qualifying voyage.
In May 1989, Bullimore was hurled from the helm to the mast when Spirit of Apricot capsized in the Bristol Channel on a trip from Portishead to Plymouth. He was knocked unconscious, trapped beneath the vessel’s trampoline netting and nearly drowned before being dragged from the water, given the kiss of life and airlifted to hospital. A member of Bullimore’s crew was lost overboard, and shortly thereafter Bullimore sold the vessel, replacing her with Global Challenger, a wing-masted schooner that boasted the most advanced technology of its day.
Having financed construction himself, to the tune of £500,000, in 1992 Bullimore sought sponsorship for the costs of the 100-day Vendée Globe circumnavigation with Exide batteries. The deal finally done, he renamed his boat Exide Challenger and – despite autopilot failure at the outset – set off a second time from the French port of Les Sables d’olonne.
Anthony Maurice Frederick Bullimore was born on January 15 1939 at Southend-on-sea, the son of a market trader who dealt in bric-a-brac. His mother, who ran a café, came from Portuguese Jewish stock. Young Tony sometimes bunked off school to sell trinkets to day trippers.
In 1958, in search of adventure, he emigrated to South Africa. But by 1965 he had returned to Britain and settled in Bristol, describing himself as a company director.
Bullimore felt dogged by the British tabloids, who characterised him as a Del Boy figure. Sponsorship aside, exactly how a provincial freewheeling entrepreneur financed his exploits was never apparent; Exide Challenger went to the bottom of the Southern Ocean uninsured, leaving him with a bill of nearly £450,000. However, his autobiography Saved (1998) became a bestseller, and in 2000 he crossed the Atlantic with the comedian Lenny Henry for a television documentary.
In 2005 he finished second on his 102ft catamaran Doha 2006 in the Oryx Quest, the first round-the-world race to start and finish in the Middle East.
Tony Bullimore married, in 1965, Lalel Jackson, a Jamaican whom he met shortly after her arrival in Britain. They had no children.
Tony Bullimore, born January 15 1939, died 31 July 2018