The final days of the sub races went a little bit smoother (a little smoke, but no fire). All the paperwork was mostly taken care of, and the teams got a lot more races in. Omer 8 set a world record for a single person, propeller driven sub, they went over 7 knots while underwater! Also, I was able to dive a lot more. One team was short a few members, so they requested some support. There sub was, to put it simply, just a plastic nose-cone with a SCUBA breathing system stowed inside. It was propelled by simply dolphin kicking with a whale-tail mono-fin. Amy and I got in the water to help him at the start line. After a run or two they decided to let me try it out. It was quite the struggle to enter the sub, but once in it was quite amazing. This is not for anyone remotely claustrophobic, you can’t really move at all, but its quite amazing! Once in the sub I was lowered to the starting line by Amy and the other teammate, where I awaited the command to go. Once underway I started to feel out the buoyancy and maneuverability (or lack-there-of). At one point I started skimming the bottom and couldn’t pull up, so I made everyone topside very nervous that I would break the lights on the course. I managed to finish and I don’t think I disgraced the dive support team or the Sea Rovers too badly. On the last day of races there were some closing festivities including a race for swimmers to collect rubber duckies. After we left the pool we headed over to another building on-base where we had dinner and a little award ceremonies. Some of the awards were joking, one team got a pile of debris for causing a record amount of course destruction. Some were more serious though, like we discussed engineering lessons learned–trust me, there were a lot of them!
This was one amazing week! I met some awesome people from all over the world, not only were the races fun, but I also made some great professional contacts along the way. This certainly was a great week!
