Passengers in the doomed OceanGate Titanic sub would have spent their final moments in total darkness as they searched for bioluminescent creatures, according to international reports. The wife and mum of father-son pair Shahzada and Suleman Dawood has opened up about that fateful day as it also emerged the group would have been listening to their favourite music before the sub imploded on its voyage.
In an interview with the New York Times, Christine Sawood detailed her family's obsession with the Titanic which led to her loved ones going on the fateful trip. A visit to a Titanic exhibition in Singapore in 2012 caught their imagination which only grew after a 2019 trip to Greenland, The Mirror reports.
There they saw the massive glaciers which sheath off into the sea creating the icebergs. It was after this they came across an OceanGate advert offering trips down to see the wreckage.
Originally it was Christine who was going to head down with her billionaire husband. But after the initial trip was delayed by the pandemic their 19-year-old son was old enough to go on the trip and so he took her place instead. They almost missed the doomed trip after a delay in their flight to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where the mother ship set sail from.
Christine told the Times: “We were actually quite worried, like, ‘Oh, my god, what if they cancel that flight as well? In hindsight, obviously, I wish they did.”
Christine was there on the Polar Prince along with her 17-year-old daughter Alina. They were there to support Shahzada and Suleman as they set off.
The days leading up to the dive were packed with safety meetings with everyone staying in cramped rooms but still the would-be explorers were ecstatic. “He was like a vibrating toddler,” Christine told the Times of her son’s excitement.
Those who would be going down were told to wear thick socks and a hat as temperatures plummet the deeper you go. They were told to stick to a "low-residue diet" the day before the dive, with no coffee on the morning of it.
There was no toilet on the tiny sub, only a camping-style toilet behind a curtain. To keep themselves entertained on the long descent, they were told to load up their favourite music to play via a Bluetooth speaker. CEO Stockton Rush, who died along with the four others on the sub, had banned country music.
As they descended the lights inside were switched off to conserve battery. They would have sat in darkness with little light apart from that from the bioluminescent creatures floating past.
Christine and her daughter watched as the sub set off for what proved to be its final descent. Contact with the sub was lost an hour and 45 minutes into the trip.
The wreckage of the sub was found on Thursday June 22.
