ALL AT SEA

Competing alone on the open ocean for months at a time, single-handed sailors are some of the toughest athletes on the planet

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British yachtsman Tony Bullimore was all alone in the Southern Ocean when a ferocious storm enveloped his 60-foot yacht, Exide Challenger. At one point, the waves were so immense that his keel snapped, quickly causing his vessel to capsize. For a few hours, with the hatches shut, he remained dry. But when one of the portholes collapsed, the freezing ocean water instantly flooded in.

Bullimore was one of several competitors in the 1996/1997 Vendée Globe, a non-stop, solo, around-the-world race. Most experts agree it is the toughest sailing competition of all.

After changing into his survival suit and wedging himself above the waterline, he rigged a distress beacon through the broken porthole. Close to Antarctica, though, he was so far from civilisation that he feared rescue was unlikely. “After a few days, I reached a point where I really thought I’d bought it,” he said later. “I thought, That’s my life over.”

For five long, lonely days, the 47-year-old survived on chocolate bars and a water desalinator. At one point he sliced off the top of his little finger, wrestling with a hatch door. Then, to his surprise, on the fifth day he heard voices and a loud knocking above him, through the inverted yacht’s hull. Straight away, he swam out through the hatch to the ocean above him. There, in a small boat, were a group of sailors from a nearby Australian warship, one of whom grabbed him and pulled him clear of the water.

Miraculously, Bullimore had dodged death. “I was so grateful at being saved that I grabbed him, kissed him on his big beard,” he later said of his saviour.

No rest for the wicked