Stephen McGinty - The World's Deepest Submarine Rescue | Modern Wisdom Podcast 351

Try and imagine that you're in a phone box next to the Empire State Building, and then the Atlantic Ocean sweeps in, then all the lights go out, then you start bleeding oxygen. Then you know that rescue is at least two days away. And what you've got to do is preserve your oxygen as long as you can. (wind blowing)

Steven McGinty, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

We are talking about the world's deepest submarine rescue today.

Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. It's the subject of my new book, The Dive: Which Is the- the Untold Story of the World's Deepest Submarine Rescue. And yeah, it's an- it's an incredible story from a kind of- from the analog age of 1973. Um, it's- yeah, the- I mean, the- the- the background to it, um, is effectively that, um, just to- to get people kind of, uh, in- in the mood, it's- it's really from the time when, uh, in 1973, when, um, new phone lines were laid down and there was what's known as the CanSat, um, cable was laid between Canada and the United Kingdom. And this was- this was high technology. You know, this was a cable that allowed 1,750 phone calls to be made from the entirety of America and Canada to the UK at any one time. So this was the days when it would be like three pounds 50 a minute to make a phone call transatlantic. Um, but this was the cable that- in fact, uh, this new cable was three times what previous cables had done. Um, and- and what- what was happening at the time was that the cable had been laid, um, but these miniature submarines, this Pisces III, um, was being sent down to do a- a simple but very important job, which was, um, to find the cable and to dig a little ditch so that the cable would then settle into the ditch and then be covered over by sand and silt. The idea being that while it was on the surface, I mean this was, um, 150 miles off the coast of Cork, so it was- it was in the- the Atlantic Ocean. Um, but it was still in an area where people were fishing and the- the fear was that, um, nets would be- would go down or- or trawlers and effectively the cable could be hauled back up. And as I said in the book, you know, Murphy's Law does apply, um, within 150 miles of Ireland and the fear was that they could- they obviously needed to- to tackle that. So- so on the day, back in August 1973, um, there was two men in this- this small Pisces III, uh, mini submersible. There was, um, Roger Chapman and there was Roger Mallinson. Uh, Roger Chapman was ex, uh, Royal Navy. He was an ex, uh, nuclear submariner, um, who had been- who'd effectively had to leave the services because his- his eyesight wasn't as good as it should have been, and he moved into the- into the private sector. And at the time, um, what was interesting about it was, it was the company that ran the submarines was- was Vickers Oceanics. Um, now Vickers, uh, is anyone from Barra or Furness or anyone who knows about the great kind of, um, nautical history of Britain will know, Vickers was the- the- the titan of s- ship builders and particularly, um, you know, military and sort of, um, naval ships, um, from the- the First World War, Second World War, and into the Cold War. Um, so what they did was that they were obviously making these massive ships but they decided that, um, it was 1973, there had been the boom in the North Sea oil industry, and they decided miniature submarines were going to be a- a- an effective gadget, effectively, that the industry would have been needed. Uh, and this little miniature submarine, um, had been invented by these- these incredible Canadians. Uh, there was a guy called Alf Trice, uh, and Alf Trice, back in the 19s- early 1960s was from Vancouver and he was one of the pioneers of- of, he was a great salvage diver. Those were the days where you wore hard hats, you went down with kind of heavy steel boots, and he pioneered some of the deepest dives. I mean, they were doing bounce dives in those days, so that basically meant that you would- you would go down as many- as- as- as deep as maybe 350 feet, but you could be down there for literally two or three minutes, and then you would take these long slow ascends to the surface to avoid the bends. Alf Trice said, "Look, this isn't... there has to be a practical device. There has to be... Let's- let's develop a submarine that- that's small, that's commercial." Um, the- the French had developed the bathyscaphe, which has gone down right down to the Canomero Trench effectively, um, but he wanted to- to develop a- a effectively a- a commercial submarine. And these guys who could go into the story later on, effectively what they did was they developed, they spent the money, they- they- they pioneered and created the Pisces, um, craft. And what was interesting about Pisces, um, miniature submarine was that they tested it in Vancouver on a day that the US Navy were testing anti-submarine missiles (laughs) . And what I find fascinating about Pisces- the Pisces craft was that- that, um, they managed- they managed on its test dive, it managed to evade a missile that- that had been sent out with- with its principal job was effectively to track down, um, submar- submarines. And there's something about it that- that says that this thing was- was- was maybe indestructible, but also lucky. Um...