Sea Technology

NOV 2016

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30 st / November 2016 www.sea-technology.com Ocean Pearl Sub SEAmagine, established in 1995, is a manufacturer of small manned submersibles with more than 12,000 dives accumulated by its existing fleet. The company produces various models of its submersibles for depths from 150 to 1,500 m. All SEAmagine submersibles are classed by the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and are based on the company's patented technologies that provide excellent operational logistics and strong underwater performance. SEAmagine's submersibles have been used in the scientif- ic, commercial and superyacht sectors and have also been used in National Geographic, BBC and numerous other film projects. SEAmagine focused on constructing manned submers- ibles that can be launched unmanned as any tender, have a high floating freeboard, and can be boarded after launch. I n 1973, Jacques-Yves Cousteau loaded two mini-subs and 20 tons of equipment on a railway to cross the Andes Mountains to see Lake Titicaca. Since then, no one has re- peated his feat of diving with manned submersibles in the lakes of the Andes Mountains. In Patagonia, on both sides of the Andes and in Argentina and Chile, these lakes can exceed 400 m in depth. Decades later, in 2012, the Prefectura Naval Argentina (PNA) looked into acquiring a manned sub for a very dif- ferent purpose than Cousteau's, to meet the pressing need to have modern equipment for salvage operations and sci- entific diving. PNA had started implementing deep-diving methods some years earlier with mixed gas diving and div- ing bells. This progressed to the use of ROVs supplied by a German company, Mariscope Meerestechnik, that came equipped with various types of instruments and were suc- cessfully used not only in the lakes of the Andes but also in the oceans around Argentina and even Antarctica. Diving operations with open or closed bells are always difficult and expensive as they require a support vessel and lots of logistics. And while ROVs can perform incredible tasks and solve many problems underwater, there are many cases where a human presence would greatly simplify the work, if it were not for the limitations of the diving procedures, temperature, pressure, dive time and so on. And so, PNA put out a call to Mari- scope for a manned sub that would be multipurpose, multifunctional, trans- portable and not too expensive. Most important, the manned submersible has to be able to dive in the nearshore ocean environments and lakes of the Andes. Therefore, it would have to be able to operate without a large support ship. The Ocean Pearl submersible model from California-based SEAmag- ine Hydrospace Corp., for which Mari- scope is the South America representa- tive, best fit the specifications. Manned Sub for Argentina Coast Guard Ocean Pearl HOV for Search and Rescue, Science By Charles Kohnen • Christian Haag SEAmagine's two-person Ocean Pearl submersible being launched in a Cali- fornia harbor for sea trials.

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