Hilary Lister
Sailor who navigated the Channel solo using her mouth
HILARY LISTER, who has died aged 46, became the first quadriplegic person to sail solo across the English Channel in 2005; in 2009 she travelled 3,000 miles around the coast of Britain, in a boat which she controlled with her mouth.
Paralysed from the neck down since her twenties – a consequence of a degenerative condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy – she had to contend with severe pain and difficulty breathing, in addition to all the usual perils associated with the sea. To ensure her safe return, a support boat tailed her on both occasions. “I like them to be two miles behind,’’ she told The Sunday Telegraph. “They like to be about 20ft behind. So we compromise.”
Hilary Lister’s journey across the Channel – the world’s busiest shipping lane – took six hours and 13 minutes from Dover to Calais. Her glass-fibre boat, Malin, was modified using parts from one of her old wheelchairs and controlled through “straws” connected to pressure-sensitive switches. Taking an inward breath on the first straw caused the boat to go starboard; breathing out took it to port. The second straw took care of winches that adjusted the sails.
For her round-britain trip she upgraded to an Artemis 20 keelboat called Me Too, which had a third straw for controlling the electronic navigation system. On this expedition her support team were more heavily involved, in part because her health was still deteriorating. She choked on several occasions and had to be given mouth-to-mouth. When the Artemis ran into heavy weather off the Welsh coast, a lifeboat had to be dispatched to escort the team safely in.
In all they stopped at 46 ports, greeted at each one by the local press and by Hilary Lister’s assistance dog, Lottie. After more than three months at sea, covering around 60 miles a day, the journey ended at Dover on August 31 2009.
The team had raised £30,000 for Hilary’s Dream Trust – a charity dedicated to providing sailing opportunities for other disabled or disadvantaged people. A documentary film of the trip, A Race Against Time: Hilary Lister’s Round Britain Dream, was aired on BBC Two in 2013.
“The third of four boys”, as she once put it, Hilary Rudd was born in Oxfordshire on March 3 1972. Her father Colin was a vicar and her mother Pauline a biochemist.
At King’s School, Canterbury, Hilary played clarinet, was captain of the netball and hockey teams, and was also keen on rugby. When she began to suffer from joint problems aged 11, her symptoms were initially dismissed as growing pains. The correct diagnosis was finally made when she was 17, by which time she had endured several operations, including one to break and reset the bones in her legs.
Determined not to abandon her long-held academic ambitions, she read Biochemistry at Jesus College, Oxford – taking her finals while lying flat on her back on a morphine drip. After graduation she went to Canterbury to do a PHD, but had to give up lab work as her illness worsened.
By 2003 she had slipped into depression and began to contemplate suicide. An acquaintance managed to intervene by taking her sailing on the lake at Westbere, just outside Canterbury. Strapped on to a dinghy in a garden chair, her head held in place with duct tape, she had found a new calling. “Within 30 seconds of being on the water, I had fallen in love,” she recalled.
She went on to sail solo around the Isle of Wight in 2007. In 2014 she joined the Omani sailor Nashwa al-kindi on an 850-mile voyage from Mumbai to Muscat – navigating thick sea mist and being smacked by flying fish on the way. For someone so accustomed to lone voyages, this trip was also a rare and welcome social occasion. “As well as the serious sailing, we had a lot of fun,” she recalled.
Hilary Lister met her husband Clifford, a music teacher, when still at school. They married in 1999.
Hilary Lister, born March 3 1972, died August 18 2018