The first few days back on board weren’t easy. READ: Experiencing sailing in the “Formula One” of the seas It just terrified me, and I am still suffering.’ And he went: ‘Simon, England expects!’ And I thought, ‘Oh, OK, OK.’” “And I said ‘Skip, I don’t think I can do it. And the Whitbread people have agreed to delay the start of the race a whole month so that we can enter,’” Le Bon said in Southampton. “He said ‘Hey Simon … we’re going to fix her up. “I managed to get them off my feet and came up with a big smile on my face. I wanted to breathe but if I did I knew that would be the end of me. “As I came up to the surface I stopped about two feet away. “I dived in and started going up – as I came up the waistband of my long johns got caught and pulled down.” “I had to go down to come up,” he told the BBC. In 2016, Le Bon watched footage of his dramatic rescue, near Falmouth in Cornwall, by the Royal National Lifeboat Institute and a helicopter from the 771 Royal Naval Air Squadron, for the first time as part of a BBC documentary. I just couldn’t sleep, because I was asleep when the keel went,” he said, reflecting on the 1985 capsize. “About two or three days after it happened, I broke out into this rash, all over my chest, and all over my arms. “It’s something you don’t realize until after the event,” said Le Bon, an avid sailor since his youth, with one of the pop group’s early hits – “Rio” – featuring the band members on a yacht in Antigua in the accompanying video.
“It really did frighten me,” Le Bon told CNN Sport in an interview at last month’s Southampton Boat Show. The incident had a profound impact on Le Bon, one of the biggest popstars of the 1980s who just one month before had performed to a worldwide television audience of 1.5 billion as part of Live Aid. Although the alarm was raised straight away by another yacht, Carat, the men were stuck inside the upturned yacht for 40 minutes until they were rescued. The boat capsized, trapping Le Bon and five other crew members inside. He was asleep aboard his 78-foot maxi-yacht Drum when the keel broke off the hull due to a design failure. Le Bon, front man of iconic 1980s British pop band, was competing in the Fastnet yacht race – a 608-mile round trip between the Isle of Wight and Plymouth off Britain’s southwest coast.
Duran Duran lead singer Simon Le Bon was at the height of his fame in 1985 when his life was turned upside down.
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