In Exide Challenger’s tiny air pocket, 900 miles (1,450 km) from Antarctica, he ran through various survival strategies in his head. “So one of my opportunities was to get on a life raft and hopefully get to the finish line and drift to Antarctica,” he said. “It was kind of crazy. There’s the cold, the storms, the vastness of the Southern Ocean.”
But as the hours and days passed, he realized that his situation was becoming more and more desperate, at the mercy of huge waves, and he prepared for death. “I was starting to feel that I might have reached my limit,” he told the BBC.
He calmly divided up the remaining time he felt he had left, giving him space to reflect on his life. “It was really just a matter of looking at the bigger picture of the situation, finally sorting out my thoughts, and creating an index of what I was going to be thinking about for the next few hours. I want to allocate more time to other aspects of my life and actually prepare myself for the final moments. ”
After several days of searching, rescue teams discovered the overturned hulk of the Exide Challenger on January 8th. The team had already found and rescued their rival, Dubois. He, too, had survived despite terrible conditions. However, no visible signs of life were visible on Bullimore’s boat.
rescuers
Bullimore was lying in the darkness on the overturned yacht when he heard the sound of a plane flying overhead. He knew that no plane would come to pick him up and that he couldn’t risk getting off the boat if he wasn’t sure if there was a chance of being rescued. . He knew that if he swam out of the Exide Challenger, he would never be able to return and would drown or freeze to death in the treacherous waters of the Southern Ocean.
In the early hours of January 9, the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Adelaide arrived at the upturned Exside Challenger and sent the crew out in a dinghy to see if they were still alive. Bullimore told the BBC that the first time he heard rescuers pounding on the hull was when he heard the sound. He started hitting and shouting back. “This was my chance. I was waiting for it. It was a door, a gate, a window. It opened just a little bit. It was up to me to walk through it. Don’t hang around.” he said.
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With a surge of adrenaline, he jumped into the freezing water of the boat and swam out from the bottom of the yacht in the darkness. “It took a few seconds to get to the other side of the yacht, a few seconds to jump off the yacht and get back on top, and there was Adelaide.”
of rescue worker When he surfaced, we found him on the other side of the Exide Challenger. They quickly pulled him out of the sea. weak but alive. They laid him down on the floor of the dinghy and covered him with an insulated blanket. “Someone had a spare jacket and tucked it under my head as a little pillow and said, ‘It’s okay, buddy.'” He was overwhelmed with gratitude for the rescuers. I almost got hit. He recalled to the BBC that one of his Australian Navy crew members “looked after me like a baby, talked to me, everything was great, and I kissed his beard.”
