VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) – Days after five people were lost at sea in a submersible heading for the Titanic, a Virginia Beach man reflected on his trip to the shipwreck.
“The whole experience is surreal,” Alfred Garr said.
Garr said back in the year 2000, his friend on the RMS Titanic asked him if he wanted to be a part of history.
Garr went from cleaning the shipwreck’s artifacts to heading down to the ship in a Russian-built submersible.
“It takes two-and-a-half hours to get down and two-and-a-half hours to get back up and usually your day is spent about eight or nine hours skirting around the bottom looking for the debris field,” he said.
In a space of about five by five feet, the crew of three made their way to the Titanic propellers.
After already being nervous about heading down into the deep sea, something happened that made Garr’s heart drop.
They got stuck under the propellers for 30 minutes, time that he said felt like a lifetime.
“That was a little scary,” Garr said. “It was kind of scary to go, ‘Well, we’re stuck. What does that mean?’ We’re down two-and-a-half miles. There’s not like a, ‘Let’s just surface real quick.'”
Garr’s wife, Cheri, remembered the agony of having to wait for him to get home safe.
While they weren’t married at the time, the expedition interrupted a trip in which she expected him to propose.
“I was terrified,” she said, “It was 12 hours waiting for him to respond back to me either by email or by a phone call. I was on pins and needles.”
In a press conference, the U.S Coast Guard said all five people aboard the Titan submersible have died.
The Coast Guard said the submersible likely imploded in the North Atlantic waters.
OceanGate expeditions, the company behind the trip, released this statement soon after.
”Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”