RDAUTBMag2026

COURTESY OF MIKE REISS The number of mishaps preceding this trip was amazing when you see how simple a submersible is. It’s basi- cally a car that you drunkenly drove into the ocean. It sinks like a stone until it hits bottom. When you want to come up, you drop some of your weights and pop to the surface like a cork. That’s it: Sink like a stone; pop up like a cork. When they wanted to tilt our vessel down, the pilot yelled, “Everyone pile into the front. Hurry, hurry.” To tilt it up: “Get in the back, move it, move it!” To steer it, the pilot used an Xbox game controller. I don’t mean that it looked like one or was similar to one—it was an actual joystick from a gaming system. How can I describe my voyage to the bottom of the sea? It was … boring. The ocean is pretty empty here, so there was nothing to see out the porthole. I actu- ally fell asleep. And if you want a shock, try waking up from a nap thinking you’re at home in bed, and realizing you’re trapped in a steel tube 2 miles underwater and sinking. We touched bottom amid the usual assortment of catastrophes. We were nowhere near the Titanic . There were underwater currents pushing us farther and farther in the wrong direction. The sonar wasn’t working, and the compass kept flopping from east to west, north to south. A compass has one job and it wasn’t doing it. There was also a time crunch. We had started late, and there was a hurricane rolling in on the surface. Just another day in the life of Capt. Stockton Rush. A navigator on the surface sent us directions, but they didn’t conform to what we were seeing. Our Russian science officer kept radioing the surface: “We need better directions. Switch to the B map.” The reply? “What is the B map?” There were five of us in the submers- ible, and four of us were working on the navigation. I was just 180 pounds of ballast. And finally, just before we had to resurface, we saw it: the bow of the Titanic . We had minutes to snap selfies with the famous parts: the railing, the prow, the anchor. It looked just like it did in the movies. It wasn’t overwhelm- ing; it wasn’t underwhelming. It was just whelming. The author, inside the Titan , with a stunning view of the Titanic ’s bow. reader ’ s digest 26 may 2026 The only real danger came in the last minute of the trip. As the Titan was being hoisted back onto the ship, the whole thing flipped vertical. Everything inside—computers, phones, five peo- ple and their sandwiches—crashed in a heap at the bottom. Our trip to the Titanic ended in chaos. Still, for me the submersible was a technological marvel. It was so per- fectly pressurized that I went from sea level to 21/2miles deep and back again, and my ears never popped. It was only when the voyage ended that I learned the import of what I’d been through. Capt. Rush told me, “More people have been in outer space than have done what you did yester- day.” A passenger from Guadalajara became the first Mexican ever to reach the Titanic . I became the first Simpsons writer to get there. Denise was already planning a return trip so we could visit the Titanic together. That trip I never wanted to take? I’d be taking it twice. Whatever it cost me, I’d be paying double. But it was not to Be. A year later, the Titan imploded, killing all on board. After four days of searching for the Titan , they found its wreckage. The submersible had failed an hour and 33 minutes into the dive. This sparked a four-day worldwide media frenzy. The public wanted someone to blame, and Stockton Rush became their vil- lain. They fed off news stories that depicted recklessness, cost cutting and deceit. And then there was a documen- tary that included a clip of a former OceanGate employee calling Stockton “a borderline psychopath.” That didn’t sound anything like my experience. Stockton Rush was the most meticulous, detail-oriented man I ever met. He insisted I attend his morning briefings and evening recaps, and, man, they were boring. He would carefully run through end- less checklists. In fact, he gaveme a copy of his favorite book: The Checklist Man- ifesto: How to GetThings Right . If I live to be 10,000, I will never read this book. As far as I could tell, everyone—the public, the media—was too focused on the waiver we had signed that listed 100 ways to die. But they missed the point: Rush had thought of everything; he made sure we knew the risks; we went anyhow. The National Transpor- tation Safety Board blamed the acci- dent on an “inadequate engineering process.” But was it recklessness or the risks that come with pioneering? Apollo 1 caught fire on the launchpad, killing all on board. Still, we made it to the moon two years later. Stockton Rush was what we used to admire: a visionary. A dreamer who made his dreams come true. He had many successful dives and brought dozens of people like me down to see the Titanic . He did the impossible—not once, but over and over. Then his luck ran out, as luck does. FROM REISSM.SUBSTACK.COM (JUNE 2025) © 2025 MIKE REISS. readersdigest.com.au 27 Adventure