[PSUBS-MAILIST] 2006 Sub Convention -- warning this is a LONG narrative

As I write this it is Monday night, and rain is falling with an intensity one would normally associate with tropical rainstorms. It’s been coming down since Thursday. Roads are cut by mudslides, whole neighborhoods flooded, and commutes have turned into 4 hour marathons. It was a nice weekend we picked for a three day camping trip!

I set out last Friday at 6 AM towing Snoopy toward Raystown Lake, about three and a half hours away. When I was only a few miles from my destination, the scenery had become hilly and I was driving along quite distractedly when I had to stop at an intersection. It was only when I came to a full stop that I noticed the vehicle in front of me; a school bus towing a submarine! And the vehicle in front of that was a huge truck carrying two more subs. By chance I’d fallen in with the Michigan contingent, who had driven 600 miles to be here. All I knew was that most participants would arrive sometime on Friday, but this was ridiculously good timing.

At that point the weather was overcast yet we’d all heard the ominous forecast of severe thunderstorms for the next three days, so we set about pitching tents while we could still do so in relative comfort. Then we started climbing around each other’s subs and several hours passed. We went to lunch and who should walk in, but Dan Lance. Dan had not registered for the convention because he didn’t think his work would allow for it, yet there he was. After that we investigated renting a boat at the marina but found they only offered daily rates, so felt it wasn’t worth while for the couple of hours that were left in the day. No problem, we spent the rest of the afternoon climbing all over other folks’ submarines again. You should see Gary Sluis’s hatch locking mechanism, I think that item alone provided an hour’s worth of conversation. Les and his school bus were our refuge when it rained, and he acted as a shuttle driver too.

That evening we had a cookout at a picnic shelter, and quite a few convention goers timed their appearances perfectly to arrive at the same time as the food. As the brilliant organizer, I’d brought along a large bag of charcoal but neither lighter fluid nor matches. No problem, it seemed we had an army of former scouts and ended up with a fire in due time. I must admit I was itching to get in the water, but by the time we were done with the cookout it was dark. And did I mention it was raining? No matter. It’s wonderful being in the company of madmen because when you propose taking your sub down to the boat ramp in the middle of a rainy night, everyone thinks it a grand idea. So off we went. Doug Farrow piloted a kayak that was our surface support vessel. He paddled wearing a Divelink headset to stay in communication through the dive. Nathan Hatcher was the support diver, and snorkeled along on the surface with a dive light. The rest of the crew got me launched in short order. There was an infinite supply of ready volunteers there to put blocks under the trailer tires, extend the tongue, drive the truck, etc. All I had to do was sit regally in Snoopy watching everyone get rained on, and power off the trailer with thrusters once Snoopy floated free.

I had intended to dive close to the ramp, but there was less than a foot of water under Snoopy anywhere in that vicinity, so we set out a little way into the lake. The last thing I’d added to Snoopy before the convention was a set of navigation lights, a red and white light on the bow and a white one on the stern. At that moment the rain stopped and conditions became completely calm and perhaps a little misty. With the kayak and sub both running in total silence and making barely a ripple, it made for a very special atmosphere out there which I'm afraid was probably lost on the volunteers ashore. After covering a couple of hundred yards I submerged and had an uneventful dive skimming through the weeds. I’d wanted to dive at night for several reasons; I’d been out at night in the Florida Keys last summer, and though I’d called off the dive that time due to a malfunction, the glow of the sub's lights in the water was still with me. I’d never taken Snoopy deep enough to pilot in darkness, so a night dive would provide a simulation of those conditions in less depth. And I was also aware the weather might become so bad as to make diving difficult the next few days, so felt like it was a good idea to dive while we could. But most of all, frankly I was just longing to dive because we were finally at the lake!

Throughout the evening, I’d been following Greg Cottrell’s progress towards Raystown with occasional cell phone calls. He was towing a five thousand pound sub with a truck that was overheating and a transmission that was beginning to slip. We were in the school bus when we finally saw a pair of headlamps through the rain and welcomed him into camp. He credited the rain with getting him there by lowering the temperature of the night air. Time for bed.

That night saw an unmitigated tempest a la Cape Horn, and my brand new Walmart tent could keep only a fraction of the water on the outside. I concluded that Les, in his school bus, was undoubtedly a wise man.

We were indeed all up by 8 AM, probably because of our wet sleeping bags. But miraculously all we had weather-wise was overcast skies. Everyone chipped in and we rented a pontoon boat for our surface support vessel, but conversation and sub crawling meant it was about midday before we got down to the ramp with the subs. We set out with quite a fleet. As I recall, it consisted of the pontoon boat, a second rented utility boat, two or three kayaks, and Les and my subs, to be joined later by Greg’s after some fitting out. The modus operandi was for the subs to dive near the pontoon boat, with the kayaks milling about and heading off the inevitable “stupid tourist” surface traffic. The kayakers looked like motorcycle cops, except they had dive flags sticking up behind them.

Dale Heinzig, Snoopy's builder, had tested her unmanned to 400 feet, but since then major work on the pressure hull meant she should be retested before going deep, so I had set myself a limit of 50 feet. Our initial dives were in only about 20, close to a beach where the visibility was very limited. After an hour or two there we moved our little armada across the inlet to an island, next to which the chart indicated there was a steep drop-off. As I was towed across the inlet I could see depths of about 160 feet on sonar until we were a stone’s throw from the island. Then all of a sudden the depth soundings decreased precipitously. I dove where the soundings were exactly 50 feet, and Mark Ragan accompanied me down on SCUBA.

Snoopy was a few pounds heavy even with the VBT fully blown, so I was keen to hit bottom at 50 feet to stay within my limit. I watched the depth gauge increase while the soundings got progressively shallower, indicating the bottom rising up towards me. Right on cue I hit bottom, except this was not the usual flattish bottom. At an extreme angle, it looked almost like a rock wall. The sub hit with the mechanical grabber just when I was about to start the thrusters to stop the descent. Snoopy hung on the slope by the tip of the mechanical grabber on the bow and assumed a marked stern-down trim. I looked around a bit and turned on the lights. It’s interesting seeing this descent on video, because the white grabber turns light green, then ever darker green, and finally disappears altogether into pitch darkness long before 50 feet. The camera is a high end one with excellent sensitivity, yet I could still see a little before I turned on the lights, while the camera saw nothing but blackness. The visibility was far better than before, perhaps 10 feet, yet the lights were right up against the wall, under the forward MBT. Looking out the dome on top of the sub, I could not see the wall for lack of an appropriately placed light, except when Mark shone his dive light around from outside. At this point I noticed a drip on the wall of the conning tower, but couldn’t pinpoint it's origin. I stayed a few minutes to see whether any fish were attracted by my lights, but none showed up. Then I tried to lift off with the thrusters. The sub didn't move. It felt heavier than during the earlier dives, but it was probably my imagination because I was hanging over depths I very much didn't want to visit just yet. I asked the support vessel whether all was clear above for a buoyant ascent. There were no other boats nearby, but they had lost track of Mark's bubbles and so didn't know whether I might surface right under them. As a compromise I surfaced by blowing MBT, but used only a short blow that I completed once on the surface.

The explanation for the leak became apparent when I opened the hatch. The silicone sealant between Snoopy’s acrylic dome and the hatch ring had extruded into the hull. Even more unusual, the silicone was now completely liquid, and was streaming down the acrylic. There were drops of silicone on my shirt, and it had run down the inside of the hull. I had applied the sealant in the winter, and my guess is that the temperature was too low for it to cure, so it had cured only on the surface and was liquid below that. Anyhow, in discussing it with Greg later in the day, I learned of a conversation he had with George Kittredge years ago on problems with silicone sealants. Greg and George have now switched to urethane sealants. You live and learn, I’ll be going to urethane as well.

In the evening we had dinner at the marina restaurant followed by presentations. Mark Ragan spoke about Civil War subs, a topic on which he has published two books. Jay Jeffries spoke about Simon Lake, his ancestor and the inventor of so many submarine design features -- Simon Lake obtained over 200 patents. Greg spoke about acrylic and viewport fabrication, and Dave Coakley spoke about dynamic stability of submarines. Both Jay and Dave work for the US Navy in submarine research. The Visitor’s Bureau had done a little local publicity, and I counted 80 people in the room during the presentations. It was a good evening, we went from 7 until 10 PM.

The following morning it was raining again. We put the subs on display for the general public, and were joined by Dan H with Persistence, for a total of six subs. By late morning people started leaving to catch flights, but those of us who were still on hand when we finished the display at noon went with Dan to watch him dive Persistence. That’s not only a super clean sub, it’s a super clean crew too, all decked out in Persistence Crew t-shirts. Everything about Persistence is neatly designed, built, painted, tied down. Dan was kind enough to offer a ride to Nathan, who finally got to dive in a sub after I believe attending all 5 conventions to date and helping out at every step.

I would like to thank all who made the effort to come to this event. Ray flew all the way from Oregon just when his work was busiest. Jay did likewise from Andros Island. Jim Kocourek rode his bike from Wisconsin. The Michigan trio rented what must have been a very costly truck and drove for two days each way. Greg worked for months to get his sub ready specifically for this event, and practically destroyed his truck getting the sub up those Pennsylvania hills. And I’m surely missing many others who made similar sacrifices.

See you all next year!

http://www.altoonamirror.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=2735

cheers,

Alec