When Bill Price descended into the Atlantic Ocean aboard the submarine OceanGate Titan, radio communications were interrupted. He and 4 other passengers should have surfaced without seeing the Titanic.
“We were about three-quarters of the way down once we lost contact. We have made the decision to maneuver up,” Price, 71, told The Post.
The retired president of a travel company who spent more than $100,000 on a non-refundable death trip has refused to abort his mission.
The value is an element of the growing trend of ultra-adventure travel: people – often spending lavishly – go to the most extreme places on Earth, and now even beyond. Some expeditions make Titan’s dive seem modest, with one adventurer telling The Post how he went down almost 3 times as far.
But this week, the potential price they’re paying has been thrown away with marked relief with the race to search out Titan when his dive to the Titanic goes fallacious.
On board were Stockton Rush, president and pilot of OceanGate Expeditions, and PH Nargeolet, Nautile submarine veteran – and three extreme tourists: British billionaire Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-British business heir Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaimin.
When Prine got here down, he was one in every of less than 300 people to go to the tragedy that sank 12,500 feet underwater, and he was aware that his adventure could end in death.
“Various things can occur, including death, which could be very real. You principally go in with that knowledge… to be honest, I didn’t really dwell on it. To actually experience something, sometimes you may have to take risks, and I’ve made that my mission,” Price told The Post.
“We were asked if we desired to try one other dive and I said yes. We went the next day. You might be almost at the mercy of the currents.
Price’s job aboard the submarine was to document the coordinates as he dived. When the ship reached the bottom, about 10 feet above the seabed, he was delighted to admire the side of the ship gazing the Titanic’s prow.
“It was an excellent moment. Surreal,” he said of the amazement resembling icicles wrapped around the iron of a sunken ship.
“It was the only experience of my life,” he said. “Looking back, perhaps it was a bit careless, especially since I even have a wife, two children and a granddaughter.”
Price has been chasing adventure for many years.
He bungee jumped off the Latest River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, falling 876 feet.
There was skydiving in Camarillo, California – smiling in suspension mid-free fall – and shark diving off the coast of South Africa in Mossel Bay.
He swam in the Great Barrier Reef, scuba dived in the Seychelles and rode an elephant to travel through the jungles of Thailand.
Price, a Detroit resident of humble beginnings, growing up with six siblings, doesn’t consider himself daredevil or afraid of death.
“It’s exactly the opposite. I would like to live. I would like to enjoy life and live it. I’ve never really considered myself a mad explorer, but after all I enjoy it,” he said.
The danger is an element of the reward for campers like Price, and the number of individuals willing to sign waivers for extreme adventure is on the rise.
In 2022, the sale of adventure policies through a travel insurance company Squaremouth.com increased by 28% over 2019, and this 12 months a further 46% over 2022, because of demand for travel to destinations comparable to Antarctica and safari destinations in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, Wall Street Journal reported.
A representative from international group tour company Intrepid Travel told The Post that travelers who booked a visit to Antarctica this 12 months have booked similar trips again.
“Most individuals book in the same 12 months as their trip, which can indicate they need to go now and chase that thrill as a substitute of waiting,” Matt Berna, president and CEO of Intrepid Travel The Americas, told The Post.
Others take a more calculated, athletic approach to risk.
British-American mountaineer Vanessa O’Brien, 58, has turn out to be the first woman to interrupt the Guinness World Record. “The Extreme Three of Explorers”.
She first climbed Mount Everest in 2012. Then in 2020, she dived to the deepest place on Earth, the Challenger Deep, 35,872 feet below sea level at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
And eventually launched into space aboard Jeff Bezos NS-22 by Blue Origin last 12 months to finish the challenge for a complete of 3729 days.
O’Brien, a former banker at Morgan Stanley who attributes her ability to remain calm under stress to her stamina, mentioned in the Post two near-death experiences while climbing at high altitudes that triggered her fight or flight mode.
The primary happened while she was climbing the Lhotse Face from icy blue ice to Mount Everest Camp 3 while looking down at her feet when she suddenly felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“It’s like someone covered my mouth and blocked my lungs. The signal to my brain says ‘you are going to die,’ she told The Post via email.
One other case occurred while bouncing off a cliff on Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain, attempting to land on a small ledge at the end of her rope – literally.
But her hardest mission was ascending K2, the world’s second highest peak at 28,251 feet in 2017.
She said there have been 84 deaths during her peak of the Pakistan mountain, with a fatality rate of 23%.
“During the last summit push, which lasted 16 hours, we were the only team to achieve the summit. The temperature was 40 degrees below, gusty wind whipped our faces and light-weight rain was falling. It was awful,” O’Brien told The Post.
Psychologists say thrill-seeking travelers are less more likely to release cortisol, in order that they can tolerate more risk.
“Thrill-seekers seek intense and original sensations and are willing to take risks in the pursuit of sensation” – Ken Carter, professor of psychology at Oxford College, Emory University and creator of “Buzz! Inside the minds of thrill-seekers, daredevils and adrenaline junkies,” he told The Post.
“Physiologically, they’re a bit different. Considered one of the chemicals that prepares us to fight, freeze, or flee is cortisol. Low sensation seekers secrete loads of cortisol.
“The identical environmental stimuli don’t trigger these sorts of triggers in thrill-seekers, in order that they go right into a situation and their body tells them, ‘I will be high-quality.’
“At the same time, they produce more pleasure-related dopamine and experience less stress, in order that they don’t perceive it as dangerous as the average or low level thrill-seeker might.”
Meanwhile, O’Brien is aware of the risks but continues to take them.
“Russian roulette was less dangerous than climbing K2,” she said.