![]() ![]() He counts among his finds musket balls, gold bars and a large emerald which he believes to be part of the bounty of the famous Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas wreck. “Once you get below about 150 feet, there’s a good chance of seeing something no one has ever seen before,” Mr. Allen also owns Walker’s Cay, an island in the northern Bahamas, and uses it as a base for a sub-powered treasure-hunting operation. Vescovo’s vessel broke a depth record previously held by the filmmaker James Cameron of “Titanic” fame.) Triton, which is based in Florida, is best known for taking the financier and adventurer Victor Vescovo to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench - nearly seven miles below sea level - in a titanium-hulled model in 2019. Carl Allen, an entrepreneur who sold his family’s business in 2016, owns a vessel built by Triton Submarines, U-Boat Worx’s main competitor. Personal subs aren’t just for sightseeing. ![]() “We’ve done 3,700 dives without incident,” he said with a smile. Hasselman ventured that U-Boat Worx vessels were among the safest modes of transportation in the world. The moment of the safety protocol discussion that inspired the most confidence came when I perused the thick waiver form and noticed that a large chunk of it was devoted to slipping and falling when walking along the dock toward the sub. Hasselman enumerate a number of safety measures in place in case of an emergency: 96 hours’ worth of air, extra food and water, redundant communication systems, a land-based safety command in constant contact with the pilot and a rescue sub at the ready. ![]() Drowning at those depths wouldn’t exactly be the issue most human lungs would crumple immediately if they were exposed to that amount of pressure, resulting in instant death.īefore I boarded the sub, I listened to Mr. At depths of 1,000 feet, water pressure can reach about 440 pounds per square inch - something like a large silverback gorilla balancing on an SD card. Now, they’ve become the latest frontier for pleasure cruisers.Ī submarine ride involves a lot of trust in the technology. Since their invention in the 17th century, submarines have mostly been used for war, commerce and science. The water color changed from mouthwash green to a bruised blue to storm-cloud gray, and finally into an unyielding blackness swirling with white sea snow. The submersible I stepped into (U-Boat Worx’s Super Yacht Sub 3) followed the trail of a sunken, algae-encased guide rope down the island’s steeply pitched bathymetry, until the sunlight slipped away. This particular beach, with its consistently calm sea conditions, was ideal for a plunge to a seafloor as dark and strange as the surface of the moon. I was there for a test run of an otherworldly experience that, until recently, would have been out of reach for all but the world’s wealthiest. The boat serves as the Caribbean outpost of U-Boat Worx, a builder of personal submarines based in the Netherlands, which hopes to bring its underwater machines to the masses. On the protected southern coast of Curaçao, a tropical island in the Leeward Antilles 40 miles north of Venezuela, sits a massive, Cold War-era Dutch naval ship, housing something remarkable. ![]()
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