STOCKTON SPRINGS, Maine — Heads craned and passers-by stopped in their tracks last week as Main Street took on a Jules Verne appearance for a few days while Mike Roberts readied to put his yellow submarine away for the winter.
“It’s been nonstop,” the 1996 Maine Maritime Academy graduate said Friday afternoon of the commotion caused by the sight of the small submersible. “It’s kind of fun. I like talking about it.”
Roberts, 52, a diver and marine engineer who worked for years on and around offshore oil rigs, said he purchased the Nekton Alpha sub in 2007 to do inspection work on rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Although it looks like something out of a 19th century fantasy, the sub actually was built by a California man who was part of the underwater exploration boom of the 1960s. Geologists asked Doug Privitt in 1968 to build a two-man submarine that could dive 1,000 feet.
The result was the Nekton Alpha, which the U.S. Navy tested to 1,500 feet and which aided in the rescue of the sub Deep Quest off San Diego, according to the website for Privitt’s company, Delta Oceanographics.
Roberts said that since he has owned the submarine, its trajectory has not proceeded as anticipated. That’s because the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill “dried up the market” for oil rig inspections in the gulf, he said. Roberts now has a new plan — to use the submarine next summer to do some underwater topographical mapping on the East Coast and to investigate salvaging a cargo ship that sank off the Maine coast a few years ago.
He also thinks it could be very useful for jobs involving the offshore wind industry, and dreams of teaming up with the University of Maine and Maine Maritime Academy for academic research.
For now, though, the bright-yellow submarine will be bundled up in storage until warmer weather returns.
“We’re going to try to wrap it up and seal it up real good,” Roberts said.
Before studying marine mechanical engineering at MMA, Roberts worked in various marine-related occupations, including diving for sea urchins during the urchin boom of the 1980s. Nearly 20 years ago, he and his wife purchased a home in Stockton Springs, which is why he is storing the submarine there.
His friend Geoffrey Huppe of Penobscot, who was helping him with the vessel, said that he is an airplane pilot and is looking forward to piloting the submarine.
“We both have to memorize everything so we can work in the dark,” Huppe told Roberts. “It has to be almost rote.”
Roberts agreed.
“A lot of times, you’re in pitch-black,” he said. “You don’t know anything other than what your gauges are telling you.”
Although Roberts hasn’t spent as much time navigating the ocean blue in his submarine as he would like, being underwater in it is “pretty cool,” he said.
“Anything in or under the water is a passion of mine,” he said.