[PSUBS-MAILIST] SUBSAFE

[SeaLordOne@aol.com]

Shipmates,

Although some folks are absolutely sick of this thread, I love it!  I find it absolutely fascinating when a range of different folks get down to first principles: why I joined Psubs, what I hope to get out of it, what I am willing to put into it, what it would take to drive me out of it.  I would like to share my story, for those who are interested.

I joined this site because I am planning to build a Psub in 5 years and want to learn all I can about how to do it right.  I turn 55 this year, and at age 60 I will retire and begin construction of a large dry sub, like Carsten's  (well, a poor man's Carsten's).  I designed and built a wet sub in 1973.  I had a ball with it, but is was poorly designed and I lived with the constraints that the design imposed.  It was poorly designed because I was unable to find much information on building back-yard submarines.  I read all I could find in Popular Mechanics and Mechanics Illustrated magazines, and away I went.

Over the last 30 years I have continued to collect articles, books, movies, and whatever I could find on small submarines.  Then I found Psubs.  Brian Danielson told me about the site.  Wow, here is where I am going to learn whatever I am going to learn.  I immediately adopted three goals, which I maintain to this day:

#1.  Learn what I can
#2.  Share what I can
#3.  Build the community

As far as learning what I can, I am certainly doing that.  As far as sharing what I can, I have been a bit remiss.  I have not shared much about "the Undaunted", but I will.  She is still sitting in my garage, after all these years, so it is not too late to take photos and record measurements.  And I think I was the first one to bring the Coast Guard publication "Guidance for Certification of Passenger Carrying Submersibles" to the attention of the Psubs community.  And I suspect in the future I will be a leader in helping the Psubs community come to terms with the legal and regulatory foundations of Psub development, because of my backgroud in regulation and certification.  I hope to contribute more in this are in the future.

I feel my major contribution to the community to date has been in the area of building the community.  I identified, located, retrieved and am in the process of distributing the "lost Busby's".  That took almost two years of working the system from the inside.  And I would like to think that by providing every Psubber (who wants one) a copy of the most basic of Psubs textbooks, I am helping to raise the baseline expertise of the community.  I will also work to provide a CD copy and a website for the Busby Book, for the time when the originals run out.  Once that task is complete, I will engage in another community-building project, as yet to be determined.

I believe that the significance of the Busby Books is that it demonstrates that you can make an important contribution to the Psubs community without knowing anything about submairnes.   I may know a little something about submarines, but I did not have to apply any of that knowledge to get the Busby Books.  To build a submarine you have to know a lot about submarines.  But to build a community of submarine-building resources (people, information, tools), not everyone has to know how to build a submarine.  The most important information in such a system is the information about submarine-building, and the most important people in such a system are those who have built submarines, but those who have not yet built a submarine have something to contribute.  Those "apprentices" who what to "learn the trade" can still contribute in other ways.

I was planning to write quite a bit more, but it is past 1 AM and I am falling asleep at the wheel.  So I will continue this thought in a later post.

Doug Farrow