Hilary Lister, quadriplegic yachtswoman, dies at 46

Hilary Lister, a quadriplegic sailor who learned mouth-controlled navigation technologies to steer a boat and became the first quadriplegic to sail alone across the English Channel and the first female quadriplegic to make her way solo around Britain, died Aug. 18 at a hospital in Ashford, England. She was 46.

The cause was an infection related to reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a degenerative nervous system disorder that rendered her immobile from the neck down, said her brother, Martin Rudd.

Lister, who was diagnosed with the disorder in her teens, used a wheelchair by the time she was 17 and was unable to move anything but her head by 27. Within a few years, she discovered sailing — at a time, she said, when she had just about lost interest in life.

“I couldn’t wash or feed myself or do any of the basic things in life,” she wrote in an article published on CNN in 2005. “I was in [a] very bad place where I was assessing the quality of my life and wondering whether it was worth continuing.”

Her days were spent on the sofa, and, while she could not move her body, she could feel pain — a symptom of her illness — and relied on painkillers to make her life tolerable.

But in 2003, when she tried sailing for the first time as a passenger, she said she was “amazed.”

“It was all suddenly possible, and the next thing I knew I was out in the middle of the lake and I had the sensation of movement and . . . it was as if I was free,” she told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in 2008.

She said she grew determined to sail alone. At the time, her wheelchair used “sip-andpuff” technology — straws that activate switches that in turn operate power controls. She adapted a similar technology to steer a boat, with two straws connected to motors. She either exhaled or inhaled to control the boat: The first straw controlled the tiller, and therefore direction; the second straw controlled the winches, which adjusted the sail. She used a third straw for drinking.

Lister devoted all her available time, when not recovering from various surgeries, to learning the sport and adjusting to the English waterways in her 26-foot Soling boat.

On Aug. 23, 2005, with a map strapped to the mast, she set sail on her first big trip and became the first quadriplegic to sail alone across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point on the heavily trafficked English Channel.