Photo courtesy of Alan Winick
Earlier this week we had the chance to take a tour of the amazing and decadent Upper East Side mansion that the Explorers Club calls home. The club is hosting their annual dinner tomorrow night (you're invited), and one member is bringing along his one-man yellow submarine, a project he first thought of when he was 12-years-old in Brooklyn. Alan Winick has been a club member since 1998, and this morning he told us about the sub during a phone call:
"The submarine is actually a homemade submarine, though not a backyard creation. It's a genuine one-person submarine with a depth capability of 350-feet. It's a project that I wanted to do ever since I was 12-years-old living in Brooklyn. I stayed with the project for basically my whole life, and finally as an adult I got a chance to build it.
Almost all of the dives have been in the metropolitan area, mostly in the Long Island Sound. It's used largely for education projects and is one of the smallest of its kind in the world, only 8-feet long, weighs 2,300-pounds. It's what you call a one-atmosphere submarine, which means when you dive in it, no matter how deep you go the pressure inside the sub doesn't increase, so there's no diving suit or anything required to just get in, you just get in in your street clothes as it were."
The sub will arrive at the Waldorf tonight, from Connecticut, and will be on exhibit at the dinner tomorrow. After that, it gets back to work:
"It's spent a lot of time on the road, for various presentations and shows and things like that because it's very easily transportable. As I said it's used mostly for education, it's in the process of being reconfigured a little bit for diving next summer, and there's going to be some research projects added soon. We're considering doing some dives in Rhode Island, and then possibly the following year we may go down to some tropical waters. It's never been in tropical water. It's designed to dive in low-visibility situations like we have here in the northeast."
While in the tropics, there's a good chance it will run into a jaguar shark:
