Last updated at 09:29, Wednesday, 21 September 2011

THE eyes of the world turn to Britain in 2012 for the Olympics but the search for Britain’s fastest man is likely to start at Coniston Water rather than on a running track at London.

Title
Author
Copyright

Description

A team rebuilding Donald Campbell’s Bluebird K7 hydroplane in North Shields hope to have the iconic boat back on the lake and ready to glide over the water at up to 100mph with Ted Walsh in the driving seat.

The story of the discovery of Bluebird’s wreckage 34 years in 2001 after the tragic crash on January 4 in 1967 and its recovery and restoration are being told in a half-hour documentary called Bluebird The Spirit Reborn which has been shown a number of times over the festive period on Sky News.

Mr Walsh, who has broken a number of water speed records at Coniston, said: “I do understand there is a huge amount of emotional tie-up involved in being the person who actually gets in that chair for the first time with that boat on the water and presses the go button is just a massive, massive thing.”

Gina Campbell, daughter of the record-breaker whose boat crashed after touching 328mph on the second of two timed runs, said the return of Bluebird to Coniston water would be a huge event.

She said: “I an envisioning an enormous public response in coming to hear it and to see it.

“I think it will send shivers up a lot of people’s spines. I can almost feel it now.”

Behind the on-going restoration project is Bill Smith who found the wreckage 40m under the lake surface.

With the help of volunteers and public donations – and the original drawings from 1954 – the boat is being put back to how it looked and operated in 1967.

He said: “All you had was a few pictures and a little bit of black and white footage of the crash.

“What we want to give back is something that has been built to the absolutely highest possible standard.”

As part of the restoration project a graphic design team from Sky News led by Aaron Smillie took a microscopic view of the seconds leading up to the 1967 crash making use of all available film footage.

It seems there were warning signs on the boat’s first run as the front end was starting to lift off the water at 310mph.

Ten seconds before impact on the second run there were increasingly violent bounces.

On the third bounce the jet engine cut out and the loss of thrust made it impossible to keep the nose down.

After cartwheeling in the air the boat came down on one side to hit the water still at 183mph and sent 50 tons of water into the air.

Looking out over the water where her father died, Gina Campbell said: “I was 17 when my dad died. I had wonderful years with him.

“I still feel him around me in various things I do.”

Robbie Robinson was part of Campbell’s support crew and first on the scene of the crash.

He said: “As we got closer we could see there were other bits and pieces of blue, pieces of metal, which were floating because they had air underneath them.

“And then we began to identify little things like his gloves, his socks and his shoes.

“Nobody at that stage had understood the immensity of the impact and what it had done to the boat.

“I was there for another three hours which became quite eerie.”

After laying on the lake bed for 34 years Bill Smith found the wreckage in a solo dive to check out a shape identified on a sonar map.

He said: “When I turned round it grabbed me by the foot.

“It was a piece of wreckage like an open pair of scissors that my foot went in and it locked.

“It wouldn’t go that way, wouldn’t go up or down. It would only come out the way it had gone in but as I was turning my momentum kept it pinned.

“It was just as though somebody at the bottom of the lake in the pitch dark, with my nerves strung like wire, grabbed me by the foot. What a fright.”

What happened next was not obvious. Should the boat me left where it was, brought to the surface and left as a wreck or restored to working order.

Gina Campbell knew what she wanted: “I said you realise Bill now that you can’t just leave the boat there.

“Whatever you find and whatever you film you are going to have to raise it.”

First published at 10:40, Saturday, 01 January 2011
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk