'The water came in the boat like the Niagara Falls': How a British sailor survived in an upturned yacht for four days

In January 1997, Tony Bullimore was trapped inside an upturned yacht that was filling up with "bitterly cold" water in one of the remotest parts of the Southern Ocean. In History looks back at an incredible feat of survival, and an amazing rescue.

British sailor Tony Bullimore had just made himself a cup of tea and was settling down to eat some crackers and corned beef in the galley of his racing boat, the Exide Challenger, when he heard the sound of a crack. "The snap was like a match," he said in a BBC documentary in 1997. That sound was the keel – the flat blade on the yacht's bottom that kept it right-side up – snapping off. It was then that all hell broke loose. "The yacht turned over in literally a few seconds – three, four, five seconds, the yacht was upside down. I mean, it was as quick as that."

As the boat rolled over, Bullimore was catapulted out of his seat, somersaulting and landing feet first on the inside of the roof of the yacht's galley. "The amazing thing was, I was standing all of a sudden on the roof, inside on the roof of the yacht. The roof was now the bottom of the hull. And I've got these very big viewing windows and I'm looking down into the sea."

It was then that Bullimore realised just how much trouble he was in. "When I looked down into the windows, I noticed that the boom from the foremast was slamming up against one of the windows because it was now loose, but it was hanging in there because the ropes were holding it in place." The solid carbon-fibre pole was being rammed repeatedly against the window like a sledgehammer by the motion of the storm waves. "Within about half an hour, it smashed the window. And the water came in the boat like the Niagara Falls upside down," he said. As freezing water poured into the hull, it fused the electrics – plunging Bullimore and the whole vessel into darkness. "Once the window went, that really put me into a different league of problems," he told the BBC with characteristic understatement.

The 57-year-old sailor from Bristol, England had been competing in the Vendée Globe, a gruelling non-stop singlehanded around-the-world yacht race. It is considered by many to be the world's toughest sailing race, but Bullimore was a seasoned yachtsman. As the race took the competitors eastwards into the Southern Ocean towards Australia, a violent storm struck, and the Exide Challenger was battered by ferocious waves and winds of up to 100mph (160km/h).

"You look in front of you and think it's an iceberg, you see this enormous mountain [of water], it could be up to 60, 70, 80ft (25m) high, and you can't believe it," Bullimore said. "Apart from the wave breaking forward, you get a split wave where it's breaking backwards as well, like a tumultuous mountain of water. It's really quite incredible. The power behind some of those waves, I mean, you are talking about several double-decker buses chucked in together."

He had battled this wild and unforgiving storm for several hours and, believing that he had his yacht under control and all the hatches battened down, he was "feeling pretty pleased" with himself. When the boat then suddenly flipped over, initially he couldn't believe what had happened. "I probably said to myself, 'I don't believe that the keel's snapped off,' a couple of dozen times, but it had," he told the BBC. "I was shocked, but I'm a pretty steady guy. I don't panic."

With the viewing window now broken and the upturned hull rapidly filling up, Bullimore fought his way through the "bitterly cold" rising seawater to get his insulated waterproof survival suit, stripped off his sodden clothes and put it on. Despite the sea rushing in, The Exide Challenger didn't immediately sink. This was because its bulkheads, which divided the ship into smaller watertight compartments, were helping keep it afloat. The water stopped rising just below Bullimore's neckline but it now formed waves inside the boat that were pitching from side-to-side, as the squall pounded the Exide Challenger from the outside. "You could see the seas that were inside the hull smashing up against one side, then rolling and churning up and then rolling to the other side of the yacht. It was like the inside of a washing machine," he said.

The smashed window and the boat's motion were creating a powerful vacuum effect, pulling everything – food, charts, equipment – out through the hole. "It was unbelievable, it just kept ripping things out. Food in plastic boxes that was lashed down, once the lashings got loose, the boxes just flew out." Bullimore found one of his emergency beacons, tied it to a piece of rope, dived down and pushed it through the broken window, hoping it would float to the ocean surface and someone would pick up its distress transmission.

Although the Exide Challenger was afloat for now, he knew that if the capsized yacht's watertight bulkheads started to fail, he would need the life raft which was secured in the cockpit. He ducked under the water and opened the hatch to the cockpit to try to cut the life raft free. "All of a sudden the door started to close with the pressure and I'm trying to get my hand back in. I wanted to shut the door with me inside and my little finger got caught in the door, right on the latch. I saw it sort of squeeze, and I saw the end of my finger drop off." The freezing seawater helped stem the bleeding from his severed finger and numb the pain. "It didn't actually hurt, my hands were that cold," he said.

Despite the trauma, Bullimore remained remarkably composed, but he knew he wouldn't survive long in the icy water. "The most important thing was that I had to find somewhere inside the yacht where I could get up and get out of the water because it was absolutely apparent that if I stayed in the water I was gone. I was going to die."

He went deeper into the pitch-black yacht and found a dry narrow shelf that was above the water. There he rigged up some netting next to it and crawled onto it. "It was a little kind of hammock that was up very high. It was just floating above the water, and I could get up in there and I could be out. It was amazing because after two or three hours my body started to feel warmer."

Meanwhile, 1,400 miles (2,250km) off the Australian coast, the Exide Challenger's distress signal was picked up. Australia's maritime authorities also received an emergency beacon from another sailor, Frenchman Thierry Dubois, whose yacht had capsized in the storm, too. They launched an intensive search-and-rescue operation, sending reconnaissance aircraft to scour the area. Because the two distress signals were transmitting from such a remote area, the planes had just three hours at a time to search that part of the Southern Ocean's expanse before the planes needed to return to refuel. The Royal Australian Navy deployed the HMAS Adelaide to join the search.

For the next four days, Bullimore lay curled up in his makeshift hammock entombed in Exide Challenger's upturned hull, as the seawater in the vessel gradually rose and his air supply slowly dwindled. "The more water that got into the yacht, the less space there was for oxygen. Eventually you get to a situation where 80%, 85%, 90% of the area where I was, was full of water, and 10%, 15% would be for air, oxygen. And when you get to that stage, I've got to hold my head up to a little area that is high up. The whole thing becomes very difficult then," he said.

Most of his food and water had been swept out the broken window, but Bullimore had found a can, which he managed to open with his knife, a bar of chocolate and a couple of small sachets of water, which he rationed to get them to last as long as possible. He lashed ropes to himself to stop himself drowning, in case he fell asleep and his head dropped into the water. After three days he ran out of water, adding the grim possibility of dying through dehydration to his list of problems.

Despite the cold, the isolation and his desperate situation, Bullimore did not let himself succumb to despair. He resolved to stay alive through sheer willpower. "I mean, I felt I had problems, but quite frankly if you are determined enough and you've sort of made up your mind that you are not going to give in easy and that you are going to go the whole hog, it's quite simple that you carry on."

As conditions worsened, Bullimore continued to focus on doing everything he could to give himself the best chance of rescue. He would turn his beacon on and off to signal to anyone listening that he was alive. He repeatedly plunged into the Exide Challenger's freezing water to secure his life raft so it didn't get sucked through the broken window and float away. He feared that if that happened, the search-and-rescue team might see a floating life raft and mistakenly think that he had abandoned the vessel and drowned in the stormy waters outside. "There were still a couple of opportunities and however thin and however small the opportunities were, it was a case of fighting and hanging on," he said.

In the Exide Challenger's small air pocket, 900 miles (1,450km) off Antarctica, he ran through different survival strategies in his mind. "I mean, one of my opportunities was to take to the life raft and hopefully drift to Antarctica with a finishing line that I had made up," he said. "It was a bit absurd. You've got the cold, you've got the storms, you've got the vastness of the Southern Ocean."

But as the hours and days passed, tossed around by giant waves and aware of the increasing hopelessness of his situation, he prepared himself for death. "I was beginning to feel that I might have reached the end of the line," he told the BBC.

He calmly divided up the remaining time he felt he had left, setting aside space to reflect on his life. "It was really simply just a case of me looking at the logistics of the situation and sort of finalising my mind, and indexing what I was going to think for the next few hours. I want to allocate so much time for my wife and family. I want to allocate so much time to other aspects of my life. And I actually blocked off and prepared myself for the final moment."

On 8 January, after days of searching, the rescue team spotted the Exide Challenger's upturned hull. The team had already found and rescued his competitor Dubois, who had also survived despite the appalling conditions. But on Bullimore's boat they couldn't see any visible signs of life.

Lying in pitch blackness inside the upturned yacht, Bullimore heard the plane flying overhead. He was aware that a plane wouldn't be able to pick him up, and that he couldn't risk leaving the boat if he wasn't sure that he had a chance of being rescued. He knew that if he swam out of the Exide Challenger, he wouldn't be able to get back in again and would drown or freeze to death in the Southern Ocean's treacherous waters.

In the early hours of 9 January, the Royal Australian Navy's HMAS Adelaide reached the upturned Exide Challenger and sent a crew out in a dinghy to determine if the sailor was still alive. When he first heard the rescuers knocking on the hull and then the sound of their voices, Bullimore told the BBC, he was ecstatic. He started banging and shouting back. "It was my opportunity, I'd been waiting for it, it was the door, the gate, the window, it opened a little bit and it was up to me to get through it. No hanging about," he said.

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Filled with a surge of adrenaline, he dived into the boat's freezing waters, and swam through the darkness out of the bottom of the yacht. "It took me just seconds to get to the other end of the yacht and seconds to dive out of the yacht and up, and there was the Adelaide."

The rescue crew spotted him on the other side of the Exide Challenger as he emerged on the ocean's surface. They raced over and hauled him out of the ocean, weak but alive. As they laid him out on the dinghy's floor, they covered him with insulation blankets. "Someone I think had a spare jacket and chucked one under my head as a little pillow and said, 'You're alright, mate.'" He was almost overcome with gratitude to his rescuers. He recalled to the BBC that one of the Australian Navy crew was "looking after me like a baby, talking, you know, and everything was great, and I gave him a kiss on his beard". 

Bullimore was brought aboard HMAS Adelaide to cheers from its crew, but he did not survive his ordeal unscathed. As well as losing part of a finger, he was suffering from hypothermia and dehydration, had frostbite on his forehead and fingertips, had fractured a tooth and was covered in cuts. He would undergo weeks of decompression treatment in a specialised medical centre afterwards.

He was reunited with his wife Lalel at the British High Commission office in Perth, Australia. The pair were already well-known figures in their hometown of Bristol. In the 1960s, they had opened The Bamboo Club together, a reggae venue where people of all backgrounds could socialise safely, and which had hosted such stars as Bob Marley and the Wailers, Desmond Dekker, Ben E King and Tina Turner. But now Bullimore's miraculous survival at sea had made him a worldwide news story, with many hailing his heroism and fortitude.

It was a label the sailor himself rejected, telling the BBC that the heroes were the ones "that got themselves down to the Southern Ocean to get hold of me and bring me back". He added: "I'd be happier to call myself lucky than a hero."

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