Sink or Swim

William Kohnen was test-driving his newly designed two-person submarine when all of a sudden he came shooting out of the water like a wiry cowboy on the back of a bucking bronco.

The submarine was supposed to surface slowly, but the vessel began tilting to one side after Kohnen accidentally filled one air bladder instead of two. Then the sandbags, dangling from the sides to replace the weight of real passengers, slid off. And before Kohnen knew it, he and the sub went flying into the air at Puddingstone Reservoir in San Dimas.

Since designing the Seamobile, a sub that ferries tourists under the ocean, the 38-year-old electrical engineer has spent four years overcoming a series of technical and financial challenges to enter the lucrative recreational submarine market dominated by a Canadian company.

With the kinks worked out since that test drive last year, Kohnen and his crew of engineers spent the summer on Catalina Island giving demonstration rides to prospective clients interested in buying the $200,000 underwater vessel.

This weekend, Kohnen and his business team are in Florida attending the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, one of the largest boat shows in the world.

They are pitching their vessel primarily to hotels and resorts located on the edge of an ocean where there is an abundance of colorful marine life. It is also being marketed as the latest toy for tourists, who may think that para-sailing and snorkeling have become too humdrum. It is also being pitched to marine parks, underwater archeologists and wealthy yacht owners.

Kohnen envisions hotel owners providing a one-hour submarine trip for about $100 per person. Anyone, old or young, swimmer or nonswimmer, can view a hidden, underwater world of sea bass and starfish, Manta Rays and mackerels that previously had been out of bounds to those who didn’t want to strap on an oxygen tank.

“We knew that if our mother would go down in this thing, anyone would go down,� said Charles Kohnen, 31, William’s brother and one of his partners in Seamagine Hydrospace Corp., based in Claremont.

The Kohnens are negotiating two joint-operating agreements with investors in the United States and overseas to purchase a total of four Seamobiles. Seamagine would own 20% to 25% of the partnerships and get a management fee for hiring the employees and running the submarine operation.

The Kohnen brothers are hoping to tap into the success of another recreational submarine company. Atlantis Submarines International, based in Vancouver, has been ferrying tourists around in 48- and 64-passenger recreational submarines since 1986. It gets about 750,000 passengers a year, said George Asquith, manager of business development. Last year, company revenue totaled $35 million.

Atlantis has 12 submersibles in markets such as Hawaii, Guam, Mexico, the Cayman Islands, Barbados, Aruba and St. Thomas. It is building its 13th underwater vehicle for Malaysia, where it will be used as an underwater classroom and a tourist attraction.

Under the Atlantis plan, submarine passengers pay $55 to $100 for a one-hour excursion that cruises at 1 1/2 knots per hour with a pilot inside the sub.

The Seamobile is different. A diver sits outside the passenger cabin and guides the machine while the two passengers sit inside surrounded by an acrylic bubble window. Passengers can also maneuver their own vehicle with a joystick and talk to the pilot via a microphone.

The Seamobile dives to 150 feet, with an ideal touring depth of 35 to 50 feet.

The idea of a personal submarine for just two people surfaced when William was snorkeling in the azure waters off Acapulco. He was fascinated by the exotic undersea world and thought it was a shame more people weren’t able to see this watery realm popularized by underwater adventurers such as Jacques Cousteau.

Sitting around brainstorming with fellow engineers one day in 1991, William tossed out the personal submarine idea. They liked it.

A year later, he decided to tell his brother Charles, visiting from Africa, about the concept that had been percolating in his head. He liked the idea and offered later to invest $50,000 in the company.

“The idea was way off for many people, but we did it anyway,� William said.

William began shaping his idea into a business in late 1993 after quitting his job at Schaeffer Magnetics, a Chatsworth company that builds parts for the space shuttle. He sketched out a business plan and approached banks and lenders for money. There wasn’t much interest.

Meanwhile, Charles continued working as an engineer in Nigeria at Schlumberger, an oil-services company. But he kept in touch, inquiring about the business’s first steps and his brother’s progress in finding investors. Finally, Charles decided to become a partner.

“I called him from Africa for his birthday in October 1994, and said, ‘Let’s do the company together,’ � Charles recalled. “ ‘You get the engineering going, and I will find the money.’ �

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Charles, holding on to his engineering job for another year, approached several colleagues about investing. He found 15 engineers to pool $750,000 to get the project going.

In the middle of 1994, William was looking for advice and approached Accelerate Technology Small Business Development Center, a nonprofit center affiliated with UC Irvine. The center, which promotes small, high-tech businesses, adopts 250 projects a year. Tiffany S. Haugen, director of Accelerate, liked the idea.

“It has been particularly interesting to watch this develop,� Haugen said. “To a certain extent, it is unexplored technology.�

The center advised William to come back with a more extensive business plan, more market research and a team of people, which he did.

In addition to his brother, William was joined by two other Schlumberger engineers to put the company and its product together.

With the business plan completed, William and his colleagues had to figure out what this two-person submersible would look like and how it would it work. They knew they needed a simple engineering plan to make it easy to operate as well as safe.

Their bubble-top craft is run by three battery-operated engines that need five hours to recharge for a day’s worth of voyages.

Safety was obviously a prime consideration. The vehicle has positive buoyancy, meaning it automatically floats to the top when the vertical thruster is not operating.

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There is 12 hours’ worth of oxygen inside the cabin with 24 hours of backup. A “dead man� switch turns off the vehicle if the outside pilot is incapacitated. And a strobe light shows the submarine’s location.

“The key was to build a vehicle that someone could insure,� said William, noting the Seamobile is insured by Lloyd’s of London.

To build the prototype, the engineers contacted a Houston company that agreed to do the job. But at the last minute the firm pulled out. So in the spring of 1996, the team of engineers decided to build it itself. In a commercial space in Claremont, the team forged parts together as they arrived from various Southern California manufacturers.

The Seamobile’s maiden voyage was on July 24, 1996, in the Puddingstone Reservoir in San Dimas, where the craft was filled with sandbags and all its devices were checked out for nearly one year.

Finally, the company was ready this summer to show the Seamobile to prospective clients. The Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island agreed to let the engineers use its dock in Two Harbors for demonstrations.