Now he has one.
Two and a half years ago, Flemming, a successful home construction contractor, decided to build himself a submarine, but quickly realized that this would not be a hobby, but a business.
His company, Aquatica Submarines, which has offices in West Vancouver and Calgary, recently began sea trials for its first three-person sub, and already he has potential customers lined up in tourism and the scientific community wanting to lease it.
“We plan to put it to work doing various charter operations, as well as utilize it as a showpiece and demo to sell more vehicles,” Flemming said.
Flemming didn’t start out planning to build a submarine manufacturing business. He just thought building his own submarine would be fun.
“I’ve always done very well and travelled a lot,” he said. “In my travels, my wife and I were in Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, and I saw a sub on the back of a yacht. I Googled the yacht, found the sub, Googled the sub and that got me hooked. I started playing around with all sorts of designs with the intention initially of just building one for me to play with. And then very quickly it spawned into an actual business.”
Aquatica Submarine’s first prototype is a three-person, battery-operated sub that can operate at maximum depths of 500 feet (150 metres) for up to eight hours. It is safety certified by the DNV-GL classification organization.
Flemming started two and a half years ago looking at various designs. He and a business partner ended up hiring a naval architect and several engineers and technicians. They have bankrolled the startup themselves with no outside investors.
“We’ve got a full-time team of seven of us with a few outside consulting engineers as well,” Flemming said. “We’ve got a ton of stuff lined up, and it’s looking like it’s going to be a very busy year.”
From the outset, Flemming wanted to design a sub that was safe but low cost to build, operate and maintain. Aquatica Submarines’ prototype would sell for $1.5 million.
“We plan to put it to work doing various charter operations, as well as utilize it as a showpiece and demo to sell more vehicles,” Flemming said.
Now that it has a working prototype for a recreational sub, Flemming’s company is working on a model that would have more commercial and scientific applications. It would operate to a depth of 1,000 metres (3,280 feet) and would be equipped with robotic arms, high-definition pan and tilt camera, lighting and sampling equipment.
The company’s business model is based on leasing and sales.
“Our ultimate goal is to have two or three subs that we have put out to work – charter services with a crew and whatnot – for various projects worldwide, as well as to build and sell a couple a year,” Flemming said.
Whether it’s a tidal energy company mapping out potential sites for underwater turbines or marine biologists studying reefs, much of the underwater investigation is currently done with remotely operated vehicles (ROV) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV).
“Scientists love it, as opposed to sending down an ROV and looking through a video camera and being restricted to that video camera,” Flemming said. “Now they can go down and see.
“There are a lot of uses for these submersibles in the commercial world, and in the private world you’ve got the tourism side. The tourism sector is huge. We’ve got tons of people lining up that want to go for dives. For the people that can’t scuba, this is an amazing alternative.”
Aquatica Submarines isn’t the only business in B.C. making submersibles. Nuytco Research is one of the sector’s pioneers. It designs and builds submersibles, ROVs and atmospheric diving suits, mostly for the military.
Last week, the U.S. navy was at Nuytco’s North Vancouver headquarters looking over the company’s latest atmospheric diving suit, the Exosuit, which allows divers to go to a depth of 1,000 feet (300 metres) without having to decompress.
A spinout of Can-Dive Services Ltd., which was founded in 1968, the company originally built commercial diving suits and submersibles for its own use.
“They became so popular that we started selling them,” said Nuytco founder and CEO Phil Nuytten. “A lot of the standard equipment for various navies is stuff that we invented and that we hold patents on and so no one else builds it.”
Other B.C. companies in the submersible space including Atlantis Submarines International, which builds and operates tourist submarines in vacation hotspots like the Bahamas.
“The world is well aware that B.C. is a hotbed of sub-sea technology,” Nuytten said. “It seems that the only people who are not aware of it are Canadians.”
