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Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] concrete submarine yacht roll out
Wil,
Next year we'll be in Florida so you wouldn't have to pass through the
Panama Canal.
Is there propulsion installed yet? I don't recall the details on the
motor. Also, I couldn't tell where the hatch was located by the
photos. Is it on the aft end? It would be great if you could take some
quick photos of the interior as it is right now and post them someplace
where we could look at them.
Jon
Wilfried Ellmer wrote:
Hello Jon,
Thanks for your congrats.
To bring it to the 2010 convention it has to go trough the panama
canal - the reaction of naval authorities to the boat is certainly one
of the big "yet to test" aspects of the project.
For the moment we have a building permit, we report building and
movement status to 4 different colombian authorities on a monthly base.
So we are good in colombia, but we have not yet any pronoucement of
the panama canal authority and it would be bad timing and management
to go for it now.
Obviously the boat will fit into the canal measures and it will make
the required speed to pass without jamming the traffic - but in the
end it will depend on the personal evaluation of the pilots if they
will let us go. If we come in "surfing on a wave of newspaper
articles" it will help.
Anyhow the project "doing international trips" is still a bit
far away. Next goal is bringing it to water and do limited trips under
strikt supervision of the local authorities that already know about
our project and support it to a certain point.
As Peter showed with Nautilus, if you do the right local management
such a project must not necessarily be a subject of all kind of "show
stopping intents" by authorities but can be supported, wanted, and
even be a public event.
It is of utmost importance to keep anybody in his "comfort zone". Part
of that is, that you do things "gradually" instead of "quick and
surprisingly". This imposes sometimes "speed limits" on a project.
It also imposes "social viability limits" - it is not wise to step up
and say " hi i am wil, i am a submadman i build a giant private
submarine, i do it because i can, please underwrite that..."
So it has been necessary to come up with a "corporate face and
structure" especially since we left no doubt that we see the boat as
start of a series building. We founded "European Submarine Structures
AB" registered in Stockholm Sweden and we opened a colombian
subsidiary in Cartagena.
We have a legal, technical, financial advisory board, so the argument
"beware - crazy guy - stop it" does not apply so easy as it did before.
You see "working on the proyect" in our case is not only a
"engineering thing" - engineering and trials is sometimes the least
challanging and time consuming part.
It is a lot easier to come up with a working shaft seal, than to shut
the mouth of the "funny guy" who likes to present private submarines
as smuggling vessels and prepares the ground to get your project
"regulated out of existance".
The work shedule at the moment contains a long movement to the water
(4 boat length) in which we will probably not have support by shipyard
infrastructure, heavy cranes, and similar equipment so this is
pure human power, hydraulic jacks, at 35 degree heat, - some 30-100cm
per day - it will take a while but keep anybody in comfort zone.
The viewport holes contain plugs for now so we can take the hull to
water with no "open holes" the nose contains a flange where Ian is
planning to place a acrylic dome port.
The sea trials - i would like to have a lot of time to do them because
i have a lot of questions that i am curious to get a answer for. So i
would like to test out a lot of screw (propeller) configurations to
optimize the fuel performance, i also would like to test
superstructure fairing configurations, diverse snorkel configurations,
tandem concepts, bio life support and, and...
I also would like to have some versions of interior configuration -
make high quality professional photos of all that, so that i
can publish them in "yacht magazine" whithout looking like "ugly duck"
beside the swans.
...But i expect that Ian will press me to keep a tight shedule, do the
most necessary crude work, and hand the boat over as soon as possible
- i would.
So except Ian comes down here, falls in love with tropical caribbean
cartagena, the cristal waters, and the beautiful palm islands, the
wonderful beaches, etc.etc. and decides to live here for a while, or
adopt cartagena as vacation and yachting destination - i will
probably not get a chance to do all this in this project.
Wil
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