Slowly, as we edged our way down the Cayman wall and light grew dim, we lost colors, first red, then orange, then yellow.īut that’s what the sub’s 1,000-watt floodlights are for. And though the sub weighs 5 1/2 tons, it is so buoyant that it has to take on water ballast to get down. There are five systems the sub can use to get back to the surface. We were pressurized at sea-level atmosphere. There were scuba regulators and enough air for five days (but, alas, no toilets). Pilot Phil Janca sat behind, where he could poke his head up to see through the eight 8-inch portholes circling the conning tower. The three of us sat side by side on a cushion, with our legs crossed and our toes pressed against the dome port. The saving grace was the front viewport, a dome 36 inches across and as optically correct as $14,000 worth of 2-inch-thick plexiglass can be. Imagine squeezing three people in half a Volkswagen bug and you get the idea. The whole passenger compartment of our sub, the PC 8, was a cylinder 42 inches high and maybe 10 feet long. Inside, it looked like a space capsule, cramped and lined with gauges and dials. All we could see on the water’s surface was the 4-foot-tall cylinder of the conning tower, through which we squeezed to enter. Our RSL trip began with a ride out to the sub via a shuttle boat. Compared to RSL, the Atlantis trips are shallow, keeping to the 80-foot-deep lip of the Cayman Wall. It’s long, sleek, high tech and looks like something straight from Disney. sub was built to order for tourism just last year. They have that no-nonsense, insect look of space shuttles, not at all what the 1950s sci-fi movies envisioned for futuristic submarines. The RSL subs are converted North Sea oilfield submersibles, built in the 1970s and made obsolete when offshore oil exploration went to unmanned, robot subs. got there first, starting during Christmas season 1984, in the nearby Turks and Caicos islands and later adding a Cayman operation. They are real submarines and they are taking tourists down to a world that, until now, has been the property of people with Ph.D.s. These aren’t glass-bottom boats or enclosed shells with a permanent air hole to the surface.
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