Pioneer in multihulls

It was in the 1960s that Bullimore began sailing, and loved it. He crewed for his friend Arthur Ellis, who had a 26ft trimaran named Nimble Fortune. He went on to buy a 42ft Derek Kelsall-designed trimaran, which had convincingly won the 1966 Two-handed Round Britain Race.

“The OSTAR was a British event and the first single-handed event apart from Golden Globe. And perhaps Tony saw it as being alternative to what the image of sailing was then and, coming from the other end of the earth, found that much more appealing,” says Nigel Irens, who later raced with him and designed several yachts for Bullimore. “Multihulls were known to be fast off the wind but not on the wind for the simple reason that people who sailed didn’t have a clue how to sail them. The tide was turning on that.”

In 1976, he raced Toria in the OSTAR from Plymouth to Newport, Rhode Island. Toria caught fire and Bullimore was rescued after a day in his liferaft by a chemical tanker. The boat was uninsured.

In 1982, Bullimore commissioned Irens to design a 40ft trimaran for him, IT82, in which he won his class in the Royal Western YC’S then highly prestigious Two-handed Round Britain and Ireland Race. He followed that up with another Irens commission, which became the 60ft trimaran Apricot, a progenitor of what was later to become the predominant class in the major single-handed and double-handed transatlantic races. Apricot gave Bullimore

‘HE SURVIVED FOR THREE DAYS IN THE UPTURNED HULL OF HIS YACHT’