Snippets of an interview with a woman who took the (missing) sub trip to the Titanic last July.
One woman tells Sheila Flynn how she finally ended up visiting the famed Titanic wreck at its underwater grave after a near lifelong obsession -- and what the surreal journey is actually like
Monday 12 September 2022
Renata Rojas had been obsessed with the Titanic for more than half of her life when she looked out the window of a submersible, 4,000 metres under the North Atlantic, and saw the doomed ship’s spectre appear hauntingly from the depths.
She thought she’d cry – but she was far too busy.
Ms Rojas, 50, was one of only five people on that submersible, part of the 2022 OceanGate Titanic Expedition to the wreck in July. Accompanied by a pilot and a research scientist, she and two other “mission specialists,” civilians who could pay a six-figure price for the trip, embarked upon the meticulously-planned, deep-sea exploration.
The daughter of a diving instructor growing up in Mexico, Ms Rojas had already developed a passion for the ocean and underwater exploration when she saw an old black-and-white movie about Titanic.
“At the end of that movie, you know, Titanic hasn’t been found; it’s disappeared completely,” she says. “And I was kind of drawn to the mystery of such a large ship disappearing and nobody knowing where it was – such a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened.”
Her father’s the one who pointed out she’d need a degree in oceanography, a PhD, and as such a young student she threw herself into preparation for that career. She did papers on Titanic, she applied early to Woods Hole and was accepted, she says.
Then the Titanic was found in 1985, right before she would have started studying there. Ms Rojas says she was discouraged by the attitudes of people in the industry and those involved in the ship’s discovery; she was told that, as a woman, she shouldn’t even bother pursuing that particular passion, she tells The Independent.
She’d go on to switch to banking and graduated from a university in New York...When OceanGate Expeditions began letting civilians participate in trips to the wreck, she worked every contact she had. Eventually, in July – after saving for most of her life, undergoing training and spending literal decades pursuing one goal – Ms Rojas found herself hurtling towards the ocean floor in July 2022 in a submersible called Titan.
On board with her was Dr Ross; pilot Scott Griffith; and two other “mission specialists,” one who made the journey last year as well.
“We were going down fast,” Ms Rojas tells The Independent. “Everything kind of flies [by] the window. But we were doing a little of the experiments – turning the lights off and turning the lights on to see how the life outside the sub would react. As you get closer to the bottom, the pilot starts needing help. They need to deploy some of the [equipment] to slow down the descent; you don’t want to be slamming into the bottom.”
. The expedition featured five missions, each over several days and several dives that could last up to ten hours each. Each of the dives included at least one scientist or content expert on each submersible to gather “archaeological and biological data” with the goal of understanding behaviour and rarity of life at such a depth while helping to predict the rate of decay of deeply submerged vessels, according to the OceanGate site.
One thing that really stood out to her was when the Titan crew spotted the ship’s famed telegraph (there has been varied and legal debate over salvaging the Marconi item, which sent distress calls before Titanic eventually sank. But it’s still there.)
“Certain items are legendary,” Ms Rojas says. “Anybody will ask me, ‘What is the most important thing you found?’ The telegraph. Oh, wow. It’s copper, it’s bright - like if somebody went to shine it yesterday ... no growth on it. The lights of the sub hit it first; we were actually, at some point, turning towards the bridge.
“We approached the wreck from the back of the bow, from the aft of the bow, at the break,” she tells The Independent. “There’s a lot of debris around it. So we decided to maybe go to the front of the bow, like fast, instead of trying to go through that debris or go backwards ... so we took 10 minutes literally to drive fast alongside the wreck and then make that U-turn to have the wreck in front of us and have that legendary picture of it coming out of the bow coming out of nowhere.”
It was, she says, just like the movies, watching that mystical bow appear from the depths except there was “no Titanic music in the background.”
