wreck diving - out of a personal submarine?

A good (old) SCUBA joke goes like this:

"Young attractive male seeks female dive buddy for shared recreation and friendship, must have boat. Please sent photo of boat."

Apart from a car, which is the one vital component of any SCUBA gear (to haul all the assorted other components from home to beach or lake), a boat probably ranges second on any ambitious sports diver.

But for wreck divers, there is a new fancy to replace it: private-owned submarines!



Sounds crazy? Well, remember that every dive flick, or any action movie including diving (like virtually all 007 episodes) includes at least one "sub scene". Cousteau had one, (so did Steve Zizou;-), his grandson even has a "shark sub".

If you look past the technical and logistical problems and challenges that clearly arise from getting, building or even operating a non-military, non-scientific, recreational submarine, it all seems quite appealing (at least to wreck divers):

• more often than not, wrecks lie in deep water. That means long descents, several gas mixes, even longer ascents, endless decompression stops etc.

• the one thing most feared by divers (and especially dive boat crews) is not sea sickness itself, but "anchor sickness", i.e. the unpredictable movement of a boat at anchor, or even adrift, as there is no main propulsion component any more, i.e. the boat is rocking in ever direction seemingly at once, even in comparatively calm conditions. And this is when you have to set up your equipment, get into that gear, check your stuff, wait until everybody is ready, move around with weights and tanks and all... and nausea is rising. As far as I have heard, subs do not have that problem.

• the cool factor: hey, you can shoot your very own James Bond scene!

In fact, there is a guy that seems to be able to pull this off: Carsten Standfuss and his team are building their 16m-submarine including a diver recompression chamber and everything that is needed for a week-long trip at sea, diesel-electric propulsion and all.

Here is a more extensive documentation of their efforts in German version.