The open ocean - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 252

THE YELLOW SUBMARINE
In the spring of 1991, Delta Oceanographics, developers of a small,
two-person submersible, approached the aquarium and MBARI
to see if we might be interested in chartering the vehicle for col-
lecting and research purposes. Over the past several years the sub
had made more than two thousand dives around the world, in,
among other places, the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Great Bar-
rier Reef and at H-bomb sites in the South Pacific. They thought
there might be some projects in the canyon where a live person
on the bottom would be better than a remotely operated vehicle.
They trucked the sub up from Los Angeles to take some of us
on dives in the Monterey Canyon. Gilbert Van Dykhuizen and I
were invited along, and we jumped at the chance.
The little vehicle is the VW Beetle of submersibles. Small, un-
complicated, and reliable, it's fifteen feet long, weighs a little over
two tons, and can dive to a depth of twelve hundred feet. Power
comes from eight 12-volt batteries that run the lights and the golf-
cart electric motor, which drives the propeller in the rear. Dave
Salter, the pilot, sits upright on a chair in the center, the controls,
life-support monitors, and sonar at his fingertips; his head is in-
side the cylindrical access tower, and he looks out of a series of port-
holes. The passenger lies prone between the pilot's feet and can
look out several portholes in the bow. To descend, the submarine
floods its ballast tanks with seawater; when the time comes to re-
turn to the surface, it blows those same tanks out with air supplied
from two standard scuba bottles connected to a hose manifold.
The day I went out, two dives were scheduled, one for me and
the other for Mary Yoklavich, a marine biologist working on the
biology and population dynamics of deep-sea rockfishes. The little
submarine had been loaded aboard MBARI's research vessel, the
Point Lobos. We left at seven in the morning from MBARI's dock
in Moss Landing and headed out several miles into Monterey Bay.
Our destination: the Soquel arm of the Monterey submarine
canyon, where we would dive to a depth of eleven hundred feet.