Fathom66 news

As we prepare for the launch of the print version of Fathom66 in late 2025, you can keep up-to-date with news developments here:

News 1:

Ric Wharton: diving legend becomes first patron of Fathom66

August 2025

The first patron of Fathom66 is a genuine legend of the diving and subsea industries.

Ric Wharton is a classic entrepreneur who, together with his business partner Malcolm Williams, built up two successive subsea contracting empires, founded the world’s largest operator of diving support vessels and carried out the “salvage of the century” in the freezing depths of the Barents Sea.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Ric and Malcolm were recognised, even by competitors, as one of the smartest, most persuasive and visionary management teams in the business. As hands-on executives, they built Comex into a global powerhouse in the North Sea and then promptly replicated that singular success with their own subsea contracting business, 2W.

Ric and his co-directors sold 2W to Halliburton in 1989 but for nearly 20 years he sat firmly at the top of the global subsea contracting tree. In 2025, Ric continues in dynamic semi-retirement from his home in Guernsey, and brings a wealth of unique memories and insights to share with Fathom66 readers in Issue 1.

The salvage of the century

Not content with achieving commercial success in one of the most competitive industries around, however, Ric also trumped the rest of the diving world when 2W led a consortium in 1981 which pulled off “the salvage of the century”.

This involved recovering 5.5 tonnes of gold bullion (worth around £600 million in current prices) from the wreck of the sunken British light cruiser HMS Edinburgh in the freezing waters of the Barents Sea.

It was a truly remarkable feat – diving to depths of 245m (800ft) and undertaking a precision underwater cutting operation to recover 431 gold bars without disturbing a war grave.

The inside story of this epic salvage will be serialised in future issues of Fathom66, and Ric’s informative book of the same title is available for purchase on Amazon.

We are very pleased to welcome Ric to the Fathom66 project. “The early days of subsea engineering represented a key chapter in the history of the offshore oil and gas industry,” he says. “I have many great personal memories from the 1970s and 1980s and am delighted to see them reproduced in Fathom66.”

News 2:

Diver statues unveiled in Santa Barbara and Aberdeen

August 2025