After my Captain Zodiac ride, I had an interview arranged with Karin, who has her own Hawaiian-based news website, Hawaii247, as well as often submitting articles for Associated Press. As we ate lunch and chatted, Karin told me that her father ran the submarine Atlantis, and although it was not quite a trip to the seabed to see the Titanic, she suggested that I might like to take a trip down.
So this morning I met with her father, Michael, operator of “Atlantis X” in Kona, number ten of a fleet of fifteen such subs worldwide.
I was running slightly late, and Michael and I headed quickly down to the pier, where we boarded the boat which would take us out to the sub.
Atlantis X is quite impressively large, with large viewing ports, and once seated, we went through dive proceedures, and were soon underwater. We glided along the reef wall, and the knowledgable guide pointed out all sorts of fish, coral, and other interesting features.
We got down to an impressive depth of 114 feet at the deepest part of the dive, which is deeper than most scuba divers ever get to, and could see that the water had filtered all of the colour out of the light, and everything appeared in a bluish monotone. The surface was no longer visible far above us.
The dive was over all too soon, and we resurfaced and were collected by the boat again.
Michael told me some pretty interesting facts. They have done over 32,000 dives with that particular submarine, and over 11 million dives worldwide, but as a new member of the sumbariners club, I had just joined a very exclusive one tenth of one percent of the world’s population who have been down in a submarine.
Thanks to both Karin and Michael, and all at Atlantis Submarines for a fantastic voyage to the bottom of the sea (…well, not quite the bottom, but quite a way down, anyway!)
Photo credit:- thanks to Tom, Atlantis Sub’s official photographer for the first pic of myself with Michael.