He spent more than three days stuck in a submersible fifty years ago. Roger Mallinson told AFP on Wednesday of the anguish and cold while waiting for help. Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman were rescued in the deepest rescue operation ever. Their little submersible, Pisces IIIhad found himself stuck at the bottom of the Atlantic, 480 meters deep, during a dive to lay a telephone cable in 1973.
Roger Chapman, a former Royal Navy officer, died in 2020. “I lost my companion,” says Roger Mallinson, who lives in the northwest of England. And to remember the long hours he spent, captive, at the bottom of the Atlantic, and his pessimism. “When everything goes wrong, everything goes wrong,” he says. “It was very stressful, very cold and you had to try to stay warm and not burn oxygen,” he recalls. I put on my wool sweater and I put on my overalls over it. “: “Roger Chapman didn’t have a wool sweater so we took a whole bunch of white pieces of fabric and surrounded him like a mummy. »
Thousands of dolphins were making too much noise
Roger Mallinson was reassured only when the hatch opened and he saw that the school of dolphins, which surrounded them, had left. “It was when the dolphins disappeared that we realized we were saved. They had stayed with us throughout the 84 hours, thousands of dolphins had come to watch over us, they knew there was a problem”. “We couldn’t communicate with the surface via the underwater phone, because thousands of dolphins made noise every time we tried,” he explains.
In fact, the situation of the five missing passengers on board the Titan, a small deep-sea explorer from the private company OceanGate, worries the 85-year-old survivor. “I am very afraid for them, he continues. I do not understand how these people could have been abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic without communication, it does not make sense.
The reserves of breathable air should be exhausted on Thursday on board the Titanthe race against time is accelerating in the North Atlantic, where captured noises arouse hope for the armada of rescuers dispatched to the scene.