Submerge for Comfort & Safety

Luxury Submarine

I don't know quite what got me started on this. Maybe it was the sunroof on the Concept Yacht, combined with scenes of the Andrea Gail (a 70 foot long ship) attempting to climb a wall of water in the movie The Perfect Storm.

The Perfect Storm

And then there was a bit in Das Boot about how the captain could have submerged the sub in order to avoid getting hammered by the waves from the storm on the surface, but he couldn't keep an eye out for enemy shipping if he was underwater, so they stayed on the surface, and everybody on the boat suffered from getting tossed about by the waves.

It occurred to me that the safest kind of boat in bad weather is a submarine. Besides the problem of capsizing, getting hit with a wall of water can have a tremendous impact on the structure of a vessel. Water is heavy, not like stone or steel, but heavy enough, and if it has enough velocity it can smash most anything. Shoot, we use high velocity streams of water to cut all kinds of things, from lumber to granite. If you are underwater, the water cannot cannot hit you, there is water in the way.

Normally when we think of submarines, we think of military submarines, or research bathyscapes, that are designed to go deep underwater and so have to be built very strong to withstand the high pressures encountered. But if we only want to get beneath the surface, so we are not at the mercy of the waves, we do not need to go that deep, the pressure will be correspondingly less, and the hull need not be as strong.

You could still get pressure waves, and if there was a big storm on the surface, and the waves were really high, like 100 feet, well, you could get some intermittent high pressures. So it could still get a little dicey, but at least you would be comfortable.

Update: The movies Das Boot and The Perfect Storm were both directed by Wolfgang Peterson. Is that spooky or what? Quick, somebody call The Twilight Zone!

Update February 2017 replaced missing pictures.