One-man sub could be yours
CALGARY — If you’re looking to one-up your neighbour’s new speedboat, there’s an advertisement on Calgary’s Facebook Marketplace you may want to check out.
A listing for a one-man freshwater submarine appeared on the site’s buy-andsell section on Monday.
The sub owner and builder, Hank Pronk, lives in Invermere, B.C., but listed the sub in Calgary and said he will gladly deliver it here.
The bones of the sub are from a project Pronk built about eight years ago, but he basically rebuilt it from the ground up with some major upgrades.
While many of us were learning to make sourdough bread at the start of the pandemic, Pronk took the sub on as a project, increasing the overall volume and leg room, and fixing some minor stability issues it previously had.
“I spent the summer fixing it all up and upgrading the hell out of it, and now it’s a nice, working little sub,” he said.
It’s rated for a depth of 400 feet and carries enough oxygen to keep a person safely breathing for 72 hours. It has enough power for four to five hours of cruising time, but a diver can stay down much longer if they choose to hang out.
“If you’re just sitting on the bottom watching the fish and eating your lunch, you could be out there all day,” said Pronk, who added that the design allows for great viewing.
“Because it has an acrylic cylinder for a conning tower, the visibility is fantastic,” he said. “You can see all around.”
Aside from the golf cart batteries for propulsion, it has a separate battery for lights and a CO2 scrubber in the tank.
The sub also features an escape system. Pronk built it to overcome the scariest of all scenarios — getting tangled in something on the bottom of a lake.
“Let’s say one of my propellers gets caught in an old abandoned anchor line,” Pronk said. “Normally, you’d be stuck. But all my motors and my mechanical arm are mounted on a chassis. If they get tangled, I can release the whole chassis and I get untangled.
“The remaining part of the submarine is now hundreds of pounds lighter and it just rockets to the surface.”
Pronk, who owns a housemoving business, has no formal training in shipbuilding or engineering. In fact, he didn’t finish high school, although he doesn’t like to say he dropped out.
“Actually, the school decided I should stop coming. So I don’t know if I dropped out or I got kicked out or whatever. I’m certainly no engineer.”
He said he started building subs when he was quite young.
“It was difficult,” he said. “Once the internet came along, then I could really build submarines, because then the world is your oyster. I just researched the hell out of everything.”
Through the internet, he’s been able to connect with other builders for technical support. His YouTube channel features detailed tours of several subs he’s built and shows some of them in action.
The internet also allows Pronk to connect with scientists in need of a sub. Through the website innerspacescience. org, he donates his equipment and time to help researchers get to places they might not otherwise be able to visit.
Phil Nuytten, president of Nuytco Research and a builder of commercial submarines and diving suits, has met Pronk and run pressure tests on one of his submarine hulls at his research facility in Vancouver.
He said Pronk started as an amateur but is now “up there with the best of them” when it comes to building subs.