MEMBER PROFILE: JOHN RAMSAY
Truly, madly, deeply
The names of our Society whiskies can always fire the imagination, but Cask No. 95.60: Deep as the Mariana Trench has inspired design engineer John Ramsay to take a dram on a journey to the deepest place on earth, as Tom Bruce-Gardyne reports
With its nose of ‘wafted toasted oak, toffee apples and black tea’, Society Cask No. 95.60 was deemed to be as ‘Deep as the Mariana Trench’. The name stuck, linking this 14-year-old Speyside, now sadly out of stock, to the deepest place on earth. “It’s in the Western Pacific, about half a day’s sailing from Guam,” says John Ramsay, and he should know.
The Mariana Trench is a slender crescent, some 2,500km long, where two of the earth’s tectonic plates collide and buckle downwards. “There are various points within it, and the deepest is a place called Challenger Deep at over 10,900 metres,” says John. That’s over 2km more than the height of Everest.
Having founded Dark Ocean Deepsea in 2015 with his childhood friend and electrical engineer, Tom Blades, John set about designing a submersible that could reach such depths. It needed an immensely strong titanium hull and three conical windows, made of acrylic, to withstand pressure on the seabed over 1,000 times greater than on the surface.
Like many of their designs it was built by Triton Submarines in Florida, which has carved out a niche supplying the wealthy with bespoke submersibles. There’s clearly an element of ‘toys for the boys’, but the deep-sea subs have lured their owners into the world of oceanography and scientific research. As John says: “The people who have the means to build these kinds of things also have the curiosity to learn what’s going on.
“You get these mutually beneficial arrangements where scientists can commandeer a submersible for a few weeks and the owner gets to learn.”
The original versions “had always been very chunky, clunky big things,” he says, and “looked like a bunch of pipes and metal bolted together”. Not something your average tycoon would want to pollute the afterdeck of their yacht, even if it could bear the weight. Dark Ocean’s designs are far sleeker and more streamlined, and function better as a result.
ABOVE: The submersible Limiting Factor broke the record for the world’s deepest dive, 11,000 metres to the bottom of the Mariana Trench
Triton 36,000/2 was commissioned by the private equity investor, explorer and former US naval officer, Victor Vescovo. Renamed Limiting Factor, it was finally ready to plunge to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in April 2019, after years in the design, build and testing phase. Vescovo went first on his own, breaking the record for the world’s deepest dive. John and Patrick Lahey, Triton’s president, followed a few days later.
He describes the descent as “long, slow and dark, and it gets quite cold. For four hours, as you’re descending through 11 kilometres of open water, you become quite literally the most remote person on the planet. Once you go beyond 6,000 metres, it’s self-rescue only. No-one’s going to get you. So, you’ve got this amazing feeling of isolation and exposure. At the same time, you’re sat in this machine that has got layer after layer of safety systems.
“The thing with submarines that most people don’t realise is that they want to come back up,” he continues.
“It’s like the opposite of a plane that wants to come crashing down to earth. If things start going wrong you just eject a load of weights and it comes safely bobbing back to the surface. In our case those weights are held on by failsafe electro-magnetic mechanisms that automatically eject if the power system fails. Subs are inherently safe.”
The light fades quickly as you descend, and “after 10 minutes you are into pitch black,” says John. Yet somehow the hours of darkness only add to the climax. “As you get to the bottom this extremely bright seabed suddenly emerges out of nowhere,” he says. “And the surprising thing is at 11,000 metres it’s got more life than I would see when I go swimming off the coast in Devon.
ABOVE: Victor Vescovo at the helm of Limiting Factor
ABOVE: Preparations to launch Limiting Factor
“If you go to the right place, you will inevitably discover, film, lay eyes on ... something that has never been seen before because it’s so unknown.”
John Ramsay (pictured)
“There are anemones and arthropods scampering around the place. It’s not thriving with life, but you do see a surprising number of little critters,” he says. But if you want something really exotic and know where to look, the subsea world is your oyster “That’s the amazing thing about a submersible,” he explains. “If you go to the right place, you will inevitably discover, film, lay eyes on ... something that has never been seen before because it’s so unknown.”
Before 2019, only two expeditions had ever made it to the Mariana Trench, the first in 1960, in an ungainly sub called the bathyscaphe, the second by the Canadian filmmaker James Cameron in 2012. By the time Vescovo got there, man-made waste had beaten him to it. Depressingly, among the myriad critters swimming past was a 3-to-4-inch fragment of plastic or fabric with the letter ‘s’ printed on it. A Tesco bag, perhaps?
John’s personal journey into this specialised world began at Glasgow School of Art, studying project design engineering where “I didn’t particularly excel. I wasn’t a model student.”
That said, he did at least discover whisky during his 10 years in Glasgow. More to the point, “I just got a really fortunate job after leaving uni, working for the UK submarine rescue team,” he says.
As for The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, he admits he had never heard of it until receiving a bottle of the famous Cask No. 95.60: Deep as the Mariana Trench last Christmas from Tom Blades. It was the perfect present, and not just because of the name. “I absolutely love Speyside whiskies,” he says. A quick call to the Society, and he discovered the simple truth of all single cask bottlings that they are one-offs, never to be repeated.
With that, he signed up as a member and promptly ordered three cases to share with others including Victor Vescovo, and for future expeditions. “We’re working on another ultra-deep project, and the plan is to hold some back and take them down with us,” he says. “It’ll be quite special, though they won’t be any different.” I’m not so sure. I think he’s underselling the experience. I think to be drinking Deep as the Mariana Trench while sitting at the bottom of the Mariana Trench would totally blow your mind.
ABOVE: Limiting Factor is the only submersible ever to be certified to go to full ocean depth