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Submarine dreams
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| The creators of the world's first and only prototype of a fully ocean-going and all-weather-capable sea-faring craft successfully completed its initial dive test on Nov. 13 in Kingsley Lake. The creation - defined as a true submersible - is designated as a hyper-sub. JASON MATTHEW WALKER/Lake City Reporter |
By MICHAEL MITSEFF mmitseff@lakecityreporter.com
When Lake City resident and visionary/inventor Reynolds Marion climbed into
the hatch of his prototype hyper-submersible power boat - and guided the hybrid submarine under the surface of Lake Kingsley - not only was history made, but it was the validation of more than 30 years of believing in his dream, even when others told him it was impossible.
“This has never been done before,” said Marion, co-inventor of the worlds first power boat
combination submarine.
Marion and his team of six professionals have worked for more than five years to get a
working prototype on and under the water.
The prototype, named Fathom, is 33 feet long, 13.5 feet wide and 6 feet tall. The Fathom was
completely submerged Nov. 13, a feat that nearly all submersible engineers believed to be impossible.
For Marion, the dream began when the 11-year-old and his brothers, Greg, 9, and Eric,
6, decided to enter the Great James River Raft Race, in Richmond Virginia.
If that was not ambitious enough, they designed something that was anything but a typical raft.
“My brothers and I thought that if we could figure out a way to over-ballast the raft and carry extra weight with us, then we could actually flood water into this raft, let it sink, and then kick the weight loose and it would pop up to the surface.
“We thought we'd surely win for the most original raft.”
Always determined
Although Marion and his brothers couldn't afford to build the raft because they “didn't have two pennies to rub together,” the concept wouldn't let go of Marion.
“That's when we started studying buoyancy, but what is so weird, is that technically, that was the beginning of this idea of hyper-ballasting - where you are carrying a lot more air with you, so you can carry more weight,” Marion said.
It may be a subtle distinction, but the dream had quietly become an obsession for the young Virginia native.
“It seems funny now, but from that very original raft design - which we couldn't afford to build anyway - I was really obsessed with what started as a raft, that then became a homemade submarine, that kept on evolving until what you see now, 30 years later,” Marion said.
The concept never left, and it was never far from Marion's thoughts as he built the submarine over and over again in his mind.
“Obviously, if I wanted to build this submarine, then suddenly at the age of 11, I needed to understand how submarines worked,” Marion said. “So I started digging into the early submarine designs, and I started figuring out what makes a submarine work - this makes something buoyant, this takes on water.
“One of the things I actually focused on was what made submarine's fail,” he said. “As time passed, I started developing the submarine more and more, and I started looking at the world, and decided that what we really needed was something with good surface speed that could still be used as a submarine.”
Chasing his dream
When his dream kept him awake too many nights, he and his wife, Mary, closed down a successful Lake Butler car restoration business.
They raised $10,000 and Marion's obsession had funding for the first time since he had been a broke 11-year-old boy, to poor to build a raft.
“We shut down the business and took our savings and decided to go as long as we could, and hope, in the meantime, that we find other people who believe in the concept, and be able to raise some money before we have our cars repossessed and lose our home,” Marion said.
It was a leap of faith that nearly became a stroll off of a mile-high cliff.
“We did actually get to the point where one morning we said, ‘that's it, we failed, I failed.' I was ready to find a bankruptcy lawyer on the following Monday,” Marion said.
“I thought we had lost our business. I didn't believe that I would be able to convince the people of Lake Butler to bring us their business again.
“I was gonna cut up the sub. It got that bad, but by the hand of God, investor's then started to appear - they saved the dream,” Marion said.
More than 30 years have passed since the 11-year-old boy began dreaming of submarines.
The launch
Last week's successful dive test at Lake Kingsley reminded Marion of the years of sleepless nights that it took for his dream to at last come true.
“There were some problems with my concept, and it took me 15-20 years to figure out. I knew the boat had to be reproducible and I knew it had to have certain safety features.
“I'd lay awake until 5 in the morning, for most of my life, building the sub over and over again in my mind. When I hit a problem, which evidently these were the problems the actual submarine community ran into, I just said to myself, ‘I'll figure that out later, I'll just keep building it in my mind.'
“Eventually, one design problem at a time, I figured it out.”
Even though Marion has no engineering degrees - and his work on the boat has been mostly seat-of-the-pants reckoning - the overall stability of the boat, the way he designed it without exact engineering numbers impressed the chief engineer of the team, Scott Shamblin, a 2002 master's degree graduate of the University of Florida.
“I'm trained to figure the exact numbers for weights and displacements, buoyancy, that sort of thing, and when I had completed all of the calculations on Reynolds' boat, basically, his overall design of the boat was not too far off.
“In a sense, it was a little bit annoying to me because it was not that far off and Reynolds is not a trained engineer,” Shamblin said, laughing.
Ironically, when Marion went into this, he was told more than once that it wasn't even possible to have all of these capabilities in one boat.
“I had started thinking about this concept more than 30 years ago, so I've had plenty of time to think about how to solve the problems from a concept standpoint,” Marion said.
Teaching aspect
Now, Marion says that with his concept in the water and working, he and his team have begun teaching the entire marine technology community that there is a better way to build submersibles.
“We've been invited to Washington, D.C., twice, and now we are a part of an analysis of alternatives being conducted by the military.
“They have shown a very high level of interest in what we are doing, and that has been ongoing,” Marion said.
Marion says that the reason this hybrid is so historic is that it's similar to when Igor Sikorski invented the helicopter; it changed the complexion of flight, adding a dimension that hadn't existed before.
Sikorski, like Marion, was intrigued at an early age and built his first rubber band-powered helicopter when he was 12 years old.
“Now, if you look at the world of submersibles and submarines - and there is a difference - there's never been a boat that can operate as a submarine,” Marion said.
The beauty of the hyper-sub, Marion says, is that it doesn't require a support ship because it can function autonomously.
“Our boat doesn't need to be carried anywhere, so it negates the massive expense associated with that.
“Our boat deploys from the end of dock and its range is more than 500 miles at its most basic configuration.”
Versatility
The hyper-sub can be configured for recreational use or military requirements. It's powered by twin 440 horsepower inboard diesels with a fuel capacity of 525 gallons.
Top surface speed is 40 knots, and submerged the hyper-sub can go 3.7 knots for one hour. Cruising speed is about 1.5 knots.
Navigational aids include GPS, chart plotting, radar, forward and downward sensing sonar and an autopilot.
Depending upon the configuration, the submarine can dive to 1,200 feet, with a self-recharging dive system from air and batteries.
Maximum deployment is 45 days, determined by fuel usage and personal stores.
“The team and I have been methodical in our testing procedures because we've got more than $1.5 million and five years of work tied up in this prototype,” Marion said.
“We've been testing its systems in smaller and shallower dives before we got to the point where we could go under fully. Our goal for this coming weekend and Monday is to try to get another six or seven dives under our belt, and during the course of that, establish that we finally got the boat kink-free.
“Now there are many special visitors that want to come down and see the boat. So now we can say to them, come down,” Marion said.
Team effort
The strategic planner and professional diver of the team is former 15-year civilian employee of the Boston Coast Guard, Bob Higgins.
“When I first saw this concept, I knew exactly what Reynolds had come up with, and I knew this was going to be revolutionary. I literally dropped everything and have been devoted to this ever since,” said Higgins, a graduate of the College of Oceaneering in Los Angeles.
Marion is the first to acknowledge that the recent successful dive test is indeed a team effort.
“I'm concept and Scott is engineering, but Gene Mock, project manager, is the co-inventor and the actual hands-on build pro,” Marion said.
“I've pre-fabricated all the moving parts for the boat,” Mock said. “I've been with the project for four-and-a-half years and I'm excited about it.
“I'm especially excited after the successful dive test we performed last week.”
Everyone in the team does the work of several people, but it seems to be a system that works well for the team.
“I assist Reynolds personally and also for the build team. My responsibilities include a lot of the inner-office work.
All of us on the team wear a ton of different hats,” Tadd Stahmann said.
“This is going to do to the marine industry what the helicopter did to the aviation industry,” Higgins said. “Now you have a vessel that can operate on the surface and sub-surface. Now, the average person will be able to explore the bottom of the ocean.”
The hull of the ship is currently constructed with mild steel, since it's just a prototype. To make the hull last as long as possible, is the job of Tim Bryant, who is a professional when it comes to
formulating paint protection for the boat.
“It's one thing to come up with an idea, but it took Scott and Gene to actually make this thing work,” Marion said. “You've got a handful of people who've been able to enjoy the blessing of possibly making history on the level of guys like Sikorski or the Wright brothers.
“We believe that 10 or 20 years from now, people will look back on this past Tuesday and say, ‘that was the day history was made.'”
the hatch of his prototype hyper-submersible power boat - and guided the hybrid submarine under the surface of Lake Kingsley - not only was history made, but it was the validation of more than 30 years of believing in his dream, even when others told him it was impossible.
“This has never been done before,” said Marion, co-inventor of the worlds first power boat
combination submarine.
Marion and his team of six professionals have worked for more than five years to get a
working prototype on and under the water.
The prototype, named Fathom, is 33 feet long, 13.5 feet wide and 6 feet tall. The Fathom was
completely submerged Nov. 13, a feat that nearly all submersible engineers believed to be impossible.
For Marion, the dream began when the 11-year-old and his brothers, Greg, 9, and Eric,
6, decided to enter the Great James River Raft Race, in Richmond Virginia.
If that was not ambitious enough, they designed something that was anything but a typical raft.
“My brothers and I thought that if we could figure out a way to over-ballast the raft and carry extra weight with us, then we could actually flood water into this raft, let it sink, and then kick the weight loose and it would pop up to the surface.
“We thought we'd surely win for the most original raft.”
Always determined
Although Marion and his brothers couldn't afford to build the raft because they “didn't have two pennies to rub together,” the concept wouldn't let go of Marion.
“That's when we started studying buoyancy, but what is so weird, is that technically, that was the beginning of this idea of hyper-ballasting - where you are carrying a lot more air with you, so you can carry more weight,” Marion said.
It may be a subtle distinction, but the dream had quietly become an obsession for the young Virginia native.
“It seems funny now, but from that very original raft design - which we couldn't afford to build anyway - I was really obsessed with what started as a raft, that then became a homemade submarine, that kept on evolving until what you see now, 30 years later,” Marion said.
The concept never left, and it was never far from Marion's thoughts as he built the submarine over and over again in his mind.
“Obviously, if I wanted to build this submarine, then suddenly at the age of 11, I needed to understand how submarines worked,” Marion said. “So I started digging into the early submarine designs, and I started figuring out what makes a submarine work - this makes something buoyant, this takes on water.
“One of the things I actually focused on was what made submarine's fail,” he said. “As time passed, I started developing the submarine more and more, and I started looking at the world, and decided that what we really needed was something with good surface speed that could still be used as a submarine.”
Chasing his dream
When his dream kept him awake too many nights, he and his wife, Mary, closed down a successful Lake Butler car restoration business.
They raised $10,000 and Marion's obsession had funding for the first time since he had been a broke 11-year-old boy, to poor to build a raft.
“We shut down the business and took our savings and decided to go as long as we could, and hope, in the meantime, that we find other people who believe in the concept, and be able to raise some money before we have our cars repossessed and lose our home,” Marion said.
It was a leap of faith that nearly became a stroll off of a mile-high cliff.
“We did actually get to the point where one morning we said, ‘that's it, we failed, I failed.' I was ready to find a bankruptcy lawyer on the following Monday,” Marion said.
“I thought we had lost our business. I didn't believe that I would be able to convince the people of Lake Butler to bring us their business again.
“I was gonna cut up the sub. It got that bad, but by the hand of God, investor's then started to appear - they saved the dream,” Marion said.
More than 30 years have passed since the 11-year-old boy began dreaming of submarines.
The launch
Last week's successful dive test at Lake Kingsley reminded Marion of the years of sleepless nights that it took for his dream to at last come true.
“There were some problems with my concept, and it took me 15-20 years to figure out. I knew the boat had to be reproducible and I knew it had to have certain safety features.
“I'd lay awake until 5 in the morning, for most of my life, building the sub over and over again in my mind. When I hit a problem, which evidently these were the problems the actual submarine community ran into, I just said to myself, ‘I'll figure that out later, I'll just keep building it in my mind.'
“Eventually, one design problem at a time, I figured it out.”
Even though Marion has no engineering degrees - and his work on the boat has been mostly seat-of-the-pants reckoning - the overall stability of the boat, the way he designed it without exact engineering numbers impressed the chief engineer of the team, Scott Shamblin, a 2002 master's degree graduate of the University of Florida.
“I'm trained to figure the exact numbers for weights and displacements, buoyancy, that sort of thing, and when I had completed all of the calculations on Reynolds' boat, basically, his overall design of the boat was not too far off.
“In a sense, it was a little bit annoying to me because it was not that far off and Reynolds is not a trained engineer,” Shamblin said, laughing.
Ironically, when Marion went into this, he was told more than once that it wasn't even possible to have all of these capabilities in one boat.
“I had started thinking about this concept more than 30 years ago, so I've had plenty of time to think about how to solve the problems from a concept standpoint,” Marion said.
Teaching aspect
Now, Marion says that with his concept in the water and working, he and his team have begun teaching the entire marine technology community that there is a better way to build submersibles.
“We've been invited to Washington, D.C., twice, and now we are a part of an analysis of alternatives being conducted by the military.
“They have shown a very high level of interest in what we are doing, and that has been ongoing,” Marion said.
Marion says that the reason this hybrid is so historic is that it's similar to when Igor Sikorski invented the helicopter; it changed the complexion of flight, adding a dimension that hadn't existed before.
Sikorski, like Marion, was intrigued at an early age and built his first rubber band-powered helicopter when he was 12 years old.
“Now, if you look at the world of submersibles and submarines - and there is a difference - there's never been a boat that can operate as a submarine,” Marion said.
The beauty of the hyper-sub, Marion says, is that it doesn't require a support ship because it can function autonomously.
“Our boat doesn't need to be carried anywhere, so it negates the massive expense associated with that.
“Our boat deploys from the end of dock and its range is more than 500 miles at its most basic configuration.”
Versatility
The hyper-sub can be configured for recreational use or military requirements. It's powered by twin 440 horsepower inboard diesels with a fuel capacity of 525 gallons.
Top surface speed is 40 knots, and submerged the hyper-sub can go 3.7 knots for one hour. Cruising speed is about 1.5 knots.
Navigational aids include GPS, chart plotting, radar, forward and downward sensing sonar and an autopilot.
Depending upon the configuration, the submarine can dive to 1,200 feet, with a self-recharging dive system from air and batteries.
Maximum deployment is 45 days, determined by fuel usage and personal stores.
“The team and I have been methodical in our testing procedures because we've got more than $1.5 million and five years of work tied up in this prototype,” Marion said.
“We've been testing its systems in smaller and shallower dives before we got to the point where we could go under fully. Our goal for this coming weekend and Monday is to try to get another six or seven dives under our belt, and during the course of that, establish that we finally got the boat kink-free.
“Now there are many special visitors that want to come down and see the boat. So now we can say to them, come down,” Marion said.
Team effort
The strategic planner and professional diver of the team is former 15-year civilian employee of the Boston Coast Guard, Bob Higgins.
“When I first saw this concept, I knew exactly what Reynolds had come up with, and I knew this was going to be revolutionary. I literally dropped everything and have been devoted to this ever since,” said Higgins, a graduate of the College of Oceaneering in Los Angeles.
Marion is the first to acknowledge that the recent successful dive test is indeed a team effort.
“I'm concept and Scott is engineering, but Gene Mock, project manager, is the co-inventor and the actual hands-on build pro,” Marion said.
“I've pre-fabricated all the moving parts for the boat,” Mock said. “I've been with the project for four-and-a-half years and I'm excited about it.
“I'm especially excited after the successful dive test we performed last week.”
Everyone in the team does the work of several people, but it seems to be a system that works well for the team.
“I assist Reynolds personally and also for the build team. My responsibilities include a lot of the inner-office work.
All of us on the team wear a ton of different hats,” Tadd Stahmann said.
“This is going to do to the marine industry what the helicopter did to the aviation industry,” Higgins said. “Now you have a vessel that can operate on the surface and sub-surface. Now, the average person will be able to explore the bottom of the ocean.”
The hull of the ship is currently constructed with mild steel, since it's just a prototype. To make the hull last as long as possible, is the job of Tim Bryant, who is a professional when it comes to
formulating paint protection for the boat.
“It's one thing to come up with an idea, but it took Scott and Gene to actually make this thing work,” Marion said. “You've got a handful of people who've been able to enjoy the blessing of possibly making history on the level of guys like Sikorski or the Wright brothers.
“We believe that 10 or 20 years from now, people will look back on this past Tuesday and say, ‘that was the day history was made.'”
. wrote on Jan 30, 2008 11:01 AM: