Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [31]
It’s hot inside the sub—about 75° F—and as we fall, Genya rechecks the systems. Only one small light is on, and Genya is playing light jazz on the CD player. In two minutes, we pass 213 feet, the maximum depth I’ve reached as a scuba diver. Scott exchanges a grin with me—we’re looking forward to hitting bottom in a couple of hours. The feet click away on the electronic display behind me, and we both watch at 492 feet as the last light disappears from the water. Light blue gave way to dark magenta, but now it is pitch black outside. The light from inside the sub dimly outlines the manipulator arm and video camera mounted near my view port, and as I watch it, I notice the occasional flash of a bioluminescent sea creature as we continue to fall.
At 10:50 a.m., we reach 6,560 feet. Genya switches on the powerful external lights for a check and examines the motors of Sergeytch, our small remotely operated vehicle (ROV), in its external “garage.” The ROV is a small robot camera linked to Mir 2 by a cable. It has not worked all week, and technicians spent long hours fixing a thruster problem so that we can get some close-in interior photos of Titanic. All systems are “go” as Genya fires up Sergeytch and tries the thrusters. At 11:17, Mir 2 reaches 9,840 feet, and Genya turns on the sonar and pings the seabed below us. At 11:42, Genya starts Mir 2’s thrusters, and we slow to lightly touch down at 11:45.
The deep-sea submersible Mir 1 being lowered to dive on Titanic. James P. Delgado
We’re at a depth of 12,465 feet. That’s 2 % miles down, the average depth of the world’s oceans, and the deepest I’ve ever been. The pressure outside the sphere is 6,000 psi. If we spring a leak, we won’t live long enough to worry about it. Outside Mir 2, in a net bag lashed to a sonar, we carry some forty Styrofoam cups as souvenirs for the crew and passengers on Keldysh. The intense pressure collapses and shrinks the cups, complete with the written inscriptions and decorations people have added to them, to less than half their original size. But this environment, though perpetually dark and crushing, does support life. The seemingly barren, yellow-white clay and silt bottom is the habitat for some species, including a large, ashy gray rattail fish that slowly swims before us as Genya lifts the sub off the bottom and we start moving forward. The sonar, reaching ahead of us, clearly shows the sharp angle of Titanic’s bow 1,640 feet away in the dark.
We start to climb a mound of tumbled clay. Suddenly, without warning, a wall of rusting steel looms out of the darkness. It fills the view ports as our bright lights pick out the edges of the hull plates and the rivers of rust bleeding from them and onto the seabed. The mound we have climbed was created when Titanic’s bow slammed into the seabed and ploughed it up as she slid along, until the thick clay arrested the motion of its long fall from the surface. Genya slowly pilots Mir 2 up past the huge anchor, still in its hawse pipe, then here we are, at the tip of the bow made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio’s “king of the world” exuberance and his lingering kiss with Kate Winslet in the movie Titanic. The size of the massive spare anchor nestled atop the bow stuns me. It is bigger than our sub, and despite seeing numerous photos and videos of it, nothing has quite prepared me for the scale of the anchor—or the ship.
We pass over the bow, the anchor chain, the capstans with their brass covers, the No. 1 cargo hold and the anchor windlass. We stop for an hour at the cargo hold, latching on to the edge of the hatch with one of Mir’s arms. Genya switches on the tiny ROV Sergeytch