The World's Deepest Submarine Rescue - Stephen McGinty - #351

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Stephen McGinty. He's an author, journalist and documentary producer. We are talking about the world's deepest submarine rescue. In 1973, two British men, Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson, were 1500 feet below the surface, laying transatlantic telephone cables in the Pisces III submarine. What happened next is one of the longest, most dangerous, complex and daring rescues ever attempted as America, Canada, Ireland and Britain marshaled their forces in the air and beneath the sea to save the two men, all while their oxygen, food and power was rapidly running out. This story is so cool. Stephen's done an insane amount of research for it. And to be honest, I really enjoy changing up the content that we put out and the sort of stories and guests that come on Modern Wisdom. It's great, learning personal development and getting new skills and finding hacks and stuff about life. But I just enjoy learning and reminiscing and finding out about crazy experiences that other people have had. You know, you don't need to, there's no pressure to remember the things. No one's going to quiz you. It's not going to make a difference to your life, whether or not you can recall the names of the men and where their position was off the coast of Ireland. But it's just an awesome story that you can relax to. And Stephen has like the most perfect Scottish accent for telling a naval submarine rescue story that I've ever heard. So yeah, enjoy this one. Sit back and relax. On a similar note, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who continues to support the show and share the episodes and gas me up or send me messages or retweet stuff that I post on Twitter. Like it is so meaningful. It's insane how sensible and radically curious everyone that listens to this is. And it just continues to blow me away. Like the show is growing so much faster than I could have thought every single time that we set targets, we blast through them. So thank you. Thank you for whatever it is that you're doing to help support it. Something's going right and long may it continue. But now it's time to learn about the world's deepest submarine rescue with Stephen McGinty.
Stephen McGinty, welcome to the show.

**Stephen McGinty** (2:33)
Thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
We are talking about the world's deepest submarine rescue today.

**Stephen McGinty** (2:39)
Yes, indeed, yes, indeed. It's the subject of my new book, The Dive, which is the untold story of the world's deepest submarine rescue. And yeah, it's an incredible story from the analog age of 1973
Yeah, I mean, the background to it is effectively that it's just to get people kind of in the mood. It's really from the time when in 1973, when new phone lines were laid down and there was what's known as the Cantat cable was laid between Canada and the United Kingdom. And this was high technology. 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 3 pounds 50 a minute to make a phone call transatlantic. But this was the cable. In fact, this new cable was three times what previous cables had done. And what was happening at the time was that the cable had been laid, but these miniature submarines, this Pisces III, was being sent down to do a simple but very important job, which was 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 150 miles off the coast of Cork, so it was in the Atlantic Ocean. But it was still in an area where people were fishing, and the fear was that nets would go down or trawlers, and effectively the cable could be hauled back up. And as I said in the book, Murphy's Law does apply within 150 miles of Ireland, and the fear was that they obviously needed to tackle that. So on the day back in August 1973, there was two men in this small Pisces III mini submersible. There was Roger Chapman, and there was Roger Mallinson. Roger Chapman was ex-Royal Navy. He was an ex-Nuclear Submariner who had effectively had to leave the services because his eyesight wasn't as good as it should have been, and he moved into the private sector. At the time, what was interesting about it was it was the company that ran the submarines was Vickers Oceanics.