Yachtsman who survived four days in an upturned hull
Tony Bullimore was best
known for “one of the
greatest survival feats in
maritime history”, said The Times. A former Yachtsman of the Year, Bullimore, who has died aged 79, decided to take part in the Vendée Globe in 1996-97 – a “gruelling” race that involves sailing 23,000 miles solo, non-stop around the world. The trip had been beset by disaster, and by January 1997, he was hundreds of miles behind the pack. Then, in a wild and remote part of the Southern Ocean, 1,500 miles off the coast of Australia and only 900 miles from Antarctica, he was caught in a storm with 99mph winds and waves 20ft high; the keel of his boat, the 60ft Exide Challenger, snapped and the vessel capsized. “All of a sudden the world turned and I turned with it,” he recalled. “It wasn’t slow motion, it was very, very fast.”
It was lucky for Bullimore that it did turn over so fast, because it meant there was a large pocket of air in the hull; he was also fortunate that he was wearing a survival suit and had managed to turn on his wireless distress signal, so that the authorities in Australia knew that he was alive (or had been). In other respects, the outlook looked bleak: the air would not last and he was sitting in the dark, surrounded by freezing water, in the middle of a stormy ocean, closer to Antarctica than civilisation. Although some said a rescue attempt was futile and dangerous, the Australian air force sent out reconnaissance planes, and its navy a frigate, HMAS Adelaide. The former eventually spotted Bullimore’s hull. There was no sign of him, but experts said he could be surviving in air trapped in the hull, and so the frigate was directed to sail into these waters – going further south than any Australian warship had been before. It found the stricken vessel, and circled it until a crew could be launched into the rough seas in an inflatable. They got up to the hull, knocked on its side and heard a noise in return. Bullimore – who had by then been huddled in the dark for four days, subsisting on a little water and chocolate – then summoned the strength to dive down into the freezing water and crash back up through the waves. And “directly in front of me... was a warship”, he said. By then, his toes had turned black from frostbite; he’d accidentally cut off part of his little finger; and hypothermia was setting in. On board the Adelaide, the 57-year-old’s first request was for a cup of tea. Short and stocky, he became known back home as the British Bulldog.
Born in Southend-on-sea, Essex, in 1939, Anthony Bullimore was the son of a music hall entertainer turned market trader, and a café owner. Something of a wheeler-dealer, Bullimore left school at 15, then moved to South Africa in search of adventure, and spent some time in the Royal Marines before moving to Bristol in the 1960s. There, he met his future wife, Lalel Jackson, who had recently moved to England from Jamaica. In 1966, braving undisguised racism, they opened The Bamboo Club, a venue showcasing African-caribbean music, where Bob Marley and Tina Turner both played. In Bristol, he was almost as well known for his philanthropy and efforts to improve community relations as for his sailing, said The Guardian. This he took up relatively late, and over the next decades, he had triumphs and disasters: he won the Round Britain Race in 1985 with Nigel Irens, on the trimaran Apricot; another boat, the Spirit of Apricot, capsized in the Bristol Channel in 1989, with Bullimore nearly drowning and one of his crew lost. After the 1997 rescue, he was asked what he and Lalel planned to do next. “We’ll live happily ever after,” he replied simply. But he was back at sea a few weeks later.
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