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<DIV>I have been out of the loop for 5 weeks on the mainland on my sailboat and
I should of read all the emails before responding when I got back. I did view
the great footage and noticed that my tower looked a little taller (good for
water ingress) and of course doesn’t have the dome so I hopefully won’t have
quite as bad of a heat problem as one with the dome but I was thinking about
Emile’s clear acrylic fairing as an option when I heard about the water egress
problems with a three foot chop.</DIV>
<DIV>It does get pretty hot here and we are about the same latitude as Florida
so I will probably be trying Phil’s idea of the frozen pouches vest and or the
gallon of frozen water and have the air coming out of my scrubber blowing
against it. </DIV>
<DIV>We have a heck of a fetch here in the middle of the pacific for the
wind/waves to build and a three foot wave is considered the norm but I think the
good news is that the tops of the waves may be further apart here giving a
better window to get in and out quickly. </DIV>
<DIV>Thanks </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Rick</DIV>
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style="FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; COLOR: #000000; FONT-STYLE: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none; DISPLAY: inline">
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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=alecsmyth@gmail.com
href="mailto:alecsmyth@gmail.com">Alec Smyth</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, October 09, 2013 4:13 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=personal_submersibles@psubs.org
href="mailto:personal_submersibles@psubs.org">Personal Submersibles General
Discussion</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Dive report - Pickles
Reef</DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
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style="FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; COLOR: #000000; FONT-STYLE: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none; DISPLAY: inline">
<DIV dir=ltr>Hi Rick,
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Well at least a 350 will be more resistant to it than a 250, since you have
a taller coning tower. You may want to consider an Emile-style clear acrylic
fairing around the coning tower to go even higher. Not sure if you are
just catching up with email, but there's also this video: <A
href="https://vimeo.com/76340636">https://vimeo.com/76340636</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Best,</DIV>
<DIV><BR>Alec</DIV></DIV>
<DIV class=gmail_extra><BR><BR>
<DIV class=gmail_quote>On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Land N Sea <SPAN
dir=ltr><<A href="mailto:landnsea1@hawaiiantel.net"
target=_blank>landnsea1@hawaiiantel.net</A>></SPAN> wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote
style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<DIV dir=ltr>
<DIV dir=ltr>
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'">
<DIV>Thanks for the write up and very interesting to hear the things you have
encountered! One thing that caught my attention was the fact that it was
difficult if not impossible to enter the sub with the 3’ chop!. I am building
a K-350 on the big Island and we have no lakes to dive in only the ocean so I
may have to address that somehow.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>best wishes</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Rick Patton</DIV>
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<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #f5f5f5">
<DIV><B>From:</B> <A title=paulkreemer@gmail.com
href="mailto:paulkreemer@gmail.com" target=_blank>Paul Kreemer</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, October 06, 2013 9:35 AM</DIV>
<DIV class=im>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=personal_submersibles@psubs.org
href="mailto:personal_submersibles@psubs.org" target=_blank>Personal
Submersibles General Discussion</A> </DIV></DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Dive report - Pickles
Reef</DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-STYLE: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none; DISPLAY: inline">
<DIV>
<DIV class=h5>
<P dir=ltr>Thanks Alec, that's a great writeup of your adventure! </P>
<P dir=ltr>Paul </P>
<DIV class=gmail_quote>On Oct 5, 2013 11:05 PM, "Hugh Fulton" <<A
href="mailto:hc.fulton@gmail.com" target=_blank>hc.fulton@gmail.com</A>>
wrote:<BR type="attribution">
<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote
style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<DIV lang=EN-US vlink="purple" link="blue">
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d">Great
tale. You should take up writing. Most enjoyable and I could
picture the whole thing.<U></U><U></U></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d">Best
wishes Hugh<U></U><U></U></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d"><U></U><U></U></SPAN> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d"><U></U><U></U></SPAN> </P>
<DIV
style="BORDER-TOP: #b5c4df 1pt solid; BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0cm; PADDING-TOP: 3pt; PADDING-LEFT: 0cm; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; PADDING-RIGHT: 0cm">
<P class=MsoNormal><B><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Tahoma','sans-serif'">From:</SPAN></B><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Tahoma','sans-serif'">
Personal_Submersibles [mailto:<A
href="mailto:personal_submersibles-bounces@psubs.org"
target=_blank>personal_submersibles-bounces@psubs.org</A>] <B>On Behalf Of
</B>Alec Smyth<BR><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, 6 October 2013 6:18
p.m.<BR><B>To:</B> Personal Submersibles General
Discussion<BR><B>Subject:</B> [PSUBS-MAILIST] Dive report - Pickles
Reef<U></U><U></U></SPAN></P></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><U></U><U></U> </P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal>In Islamorada for the 2013 PSUBS convention, we tried a
few days ago to dive the reefs off the Atlantic side of the island. After
towing Snoopy out to the dive site, I had to call off the dive because a
three foot chop made it unsafe to board. I made it aboard myself, but water
was splashing over the hatch land, and with the weight of a second person it
would have been touch and go. When their hatches are open, these little
boats are like holes in the water just waiting to be filled up by the next
wave. Three foot waves are not large, and they are entirely normal a few
miles from shore, but they are just beyond practical conditions for
Snoopy.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>For our second attempt on the reefs we changed tactics,
deciding to board at the boat ramp and make the tow under a closed hatch.
This would guarantee a dive regardless of wave conditions, but also
introduce a new challenge. With a temperature of 89 degrees above the
surface and 86 degrees below it, the problem was now how to avoid getting
cooked during the tow. There was hardly a cloud in the sky, and Snoopy’s big
acrylic dome hatch transforms her cabin into a greenhouse. The pilot, with
his head in the middle of the dome, feels that he is under a giant
magnifying glass. Hot air rises.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Steve McQueen and I boarded at Harry Harris state park at
12:30, after having spent the morning at the local school giving four
hundred local children a tour of the sub. Snoopy’s payload can be maximized
by adding buoyancy spheres. We installed every available one, and used their
buoyancy to load twenty pounds of ice inside the cabin. Our support diver,
Scott Waters, attached a white hotel towel over the dome with bungee cord,
and then tied off the tow line. We set out, towed by Doug Suhr in his
whaler, an ideal surface support vessel. He had fashioned a custom wooden
frame that allowed towing from a point just aft of midships. That is where
tugs and trawlers attach their tow lines, and it allowed the whaler to
retain good control, whereas in the past I had found Snoopy often turned
around the towboat when towed from the transom.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>The tow was unexpectedly interesting, because of the
bottom rushing by and constantly changing scenery. Most of the time it would
be sand and sea grass, but there were always changes and it would at times
become more rocky, or turn to pure sand, and drop away or rise up to just a
couple of feet from us. We rushed past or right through clouds of jellies.
As Steve put it, it felt like an arcade game.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>I have no idea how hot it was inside the sub, but it was
surely an outrageous number. Prior to departure we had applied detergent to
the viewports to prevent them from fogging. That succeeded on the forward
viewport, but with that single exception every other surface in the boat
streamed water profusely. Every ten minutes or so I would pick up a rapidly
dwindling bag of ice and give it a hug, rest it on the back of my neck, or
wear it as a hat. I went through five bottles of drinking
water.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Between the rolling of the boat, and the heat and
humidity, I found myself getting a bit woozy. It was not sea sickness so
much as a feeling of light-headedness, so we tried increasing the oxygen
concentration in the cabin to counteract it. Between us we had been
consuming ¾ liters of oxygen per minute, with the analyzer readings hovering
around 19 percent and a fraction. We bumped up the flow to 4 liters per
minute until the oxygen concentration reached 23 percent, a limit above
which the cabin atmosphere would have become a fire hazard. That is only two
percent above normal, but it made us both feel perceptibly
better.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>We arrived at the dive site two hours after closing the
hatch, and rather incredibly only four minutes after our target time of low
tide. The twenty pounds of ice had all melted. Our normal tow speed is three
knots, and the distance was only four miles, but some “hatch closed” time
was spent getting underway, some was spent on a stop to re-position the
towel when it was displaced by waves washing over the dome, and some was
spent on the final locating of the site. <U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Doug anchored the whaler and Scott swam over to remove
our towel sunshade, and to attach a video camera to the sub. In the previous
few days the heat and humidity had already led to the failure of a depth
sounder and a compass, so I had decided not to risk the good camera inside
the sub. In tropical climates at least, the cabin is a very dangerous place
for electronics.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>We initiated our dive and tested communications as soon
as the transducer went under water. The gear worked, yet the communications
were very faint. Snoopy’s transducers are mounted above the hull and
immediately behind the conning tower. Being just beneath the surface and
pointed in the direction of the whaler, the transducer’s line of sight to
the boat was blocked by the conning tower. Once at depth the communications
were loud and clear.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>The reef was unfortunately not healthy, as all reefs in
this part of the world, yet it was absolutely fantastic compared to the
lakes Snoopy normally dives in. There were large sponges, fish, and
interesting terrain. In particular, we found “streets” of sand running
between raised mounds of coral on either side, reminiscent of scenes in the
movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Visibility was about fifty
feet.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>In Snoopy, almost all the viewing underwater is done
through the bow viewport. Through the dome it is very hard to see the bottom
unless diving alongside a wall or quite high terrain, and even in that
scenario optical distortion causes features to appear very small and far
off. Nonetheless, while I could hardly see the bottom through the dome, I
did see a column of bubbles rising in the distance and steered Snoopy in
their direction. It was Scott, who had found a lost anchor. He tied it to
Snoopy’s pickup arm, and we blew some air into the ballast tanks and
delivered it to the boat.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>We continued wandering the bottom, sometimes letting the
current waft us along sideways and other times using the stern thruster to
follow the “sand roads”. These gradually led into deeper water, and we
followed them hoping for the continental shelf drop-off that is only a short
distance from Pickles reef. We started at thirty feet, and followed these
paths down to a little over fifty feet, but unfortunately did not make it as
far as the drop-off.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Snoopy was ballasted ever so slightly buoyant, perhaps
just a pound or two. One side thruster was locked in a straight down
position, the other slightly inclined to counter the rotation induced by the
props. Indeed the props only needed to turn very slowly to maintain depth,
as if turned by hand instead of by a motor. To slowly rise I would shut them
off, or I would speed them up to descend. The side thruster throttle acted
as a “depth knob”, allowing depth to be controlled with an accuracy of a
couple of inches.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Laying prone and looking out of the forward viewport,
Steve had a good view of upcoming terrain. He acted as observer, calling out
details about what lay ahead and asking for port or starboard headings and
altitude adjustments. One tries to stay close to the bottom in order to see
it better, but not touch anything in order to avoid damaging the reef. He
took a turn at the controls as well, which in Snoopy does not mean that we
changed places, but rather that we passed the remote controller between us.
<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>At one point we lost communications with the surface. We
were to learn later that the whaler had re-positioned to follow us, and in
doing so ran over its transducer cable, severing it and losing the
transducer. The whaler could have tracked us by our acoustic pinger, but
instead simply followed the bubbles of our support divers, who were
following us by sight in the clear water.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>After an hour and a half of contented wandering, we
suddenly sensed that the stern thruster had lost power. A moment later we
both noticed a smell of burning. I turned off power to the stern thruster
speed control, looked up to ensure we were not under the whaler, and
immediately initiated a ballast blow, which gives a much faster rate of
ascent than the thrusters. We could have continued maneuvering on side
thrusters only, but it seemed prudent to call the dive. Afterwards I would
discover that a little piece of fan coral had been sucked in by the stern
thruster, and wedged between the propeller and its shroud. It was very tough
material, and it locked up the thruster causing its speed controller to burn
out. Although the speed controllers are supposed to have over-current
protection, I will be adding breakers in the near future.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>One more surprise awaited us during the tow back to
shore. After about an hour of towing, we had reached a spot at which the
waves were lower, and we were on the radio to the whaler planning to pause
the tow and transfer to her. But just then there was suddenly a very loud
pop in the cabin, and my immediate thought was of a ruptured high pressure
line. It was followed a second later by another equally loud pop. I was
puzzled by the fact my ears were not registering any increase in cabin
pressure, when I saw Steve’s life preserver inflating. These life preservers
are of the type that resembles suspenders, inflated by a CO2 cartridge which
Steve’s movement had accidentally triggered. For a moment it looked like his
PFD might strangle him in the tight space, but he managed to wriggle out of
it. I’ll be looking at some way to secure the rip cord on these PFDs, to
make accidental deployment a little less likely. There is precious little
space in Snoopy under normal conditions, but with an inflated PFD the lack
of space becomes almost comical.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Finally we came aboard the whaler. Being in the tower, I
stowed my seat, climbed out, and closed the hatch quickly behind me. This
allowed Steve to reposition himself into the tower without fear of being
swamped while doing so. The hatch opened again, Steve jumped out, and we
were both on deck. It had been five hours since we closed the
hatch.<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>It was only once back on the whaler I saw Steve was quite
hungry. It was six in the evening, and he had avoided eating anything all
day, anticipating that it would be a long dive and knowing that Snoopy has
no head. Now that is dedication!<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><U></U><U></U> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal><U></U><U></U> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Cheers,<U></U><U></U></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><BR>Alec<U></U><U></U></P></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><U></U><U></U> </P>
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