The Bold Man And The Sea

Inside the ambitious quest to reach the bottom of each ocean and change the landscape of exploration

- Josh Dean

After Victor Vescovo climbed the seven Summits—the highest mountain on each continent—he skied to both the North and South poles. Only 66 people have accomplished this dual feat of human performance, dubbed the Explorers’ Grand Slam. When Vescovo finished, in 2017, he certainly could have hung up his gear and felt pretty good about his place in the annals of adventure. But the 53-year-old private equity investor from Texas was not done.

Vescovo had been considering what, after Everest and Antarctica, he could possibly tackle that would feel big enough. Outer space wasn’t really an option yet. Then he came up with the perfect quest. It would be, in a sense, the inverse of the Seven Summits. He called it the Five Deeps.

No human has ever reached the bottommost point of all five oceans, or even tried. And only one person—film director and ocean fanboy James Cameron—had touched the absolute nadir, Challenger Deep in the western Pacific’s Mariana Trench, since Lt. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard first reached the spot way back on January 23, 1960.

That’s how, in December 2018, Vescovo found himself off Puerto Rico aboard Pressure Drop, a repurposed U.S. Navy ship, preparing to take Limiting Factor, the deep-diving submersible he’d commissioned, to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 8,376 meters down. (Meters are standard in the nautical world; that’s 27,480 feet, or just over 5 miles.)

Limiting Factor is the unique creation of Triton Submarines, and the company’s president, Patrick Lahey, wasn’t thrilled that this unicorn of a customer—the rich guy who called up and ordered a full-ocean depth sub—was determined to go it alone. Lahey urged Vescovo to dive with a copilot. But this was always a nonstarter.