The World Is an Oyster to Man in His Own Sub : Homemade Craft Is a ‘Model-T’ Out for Business--and Treasure

In this land of custom Jeeps and stretch limos, personal spas and home computers, Don Siverts’ toy puts everything else to shame.

Siverts, a Torrance illustrator, has his own two-man submarine.

Affectionately dubbed Snooper, the bright yellow sub is a cartoon-like concoction of airplane parts and Plexiglas windows powered by golf-cart batteries.

Siverts, who specializes in technical drawing, uses Snooper in his part-time business as a deep-sea diver. Built from scratch in Siverts’ garage in 1969, Snooper can withstand ocean pressure as deep as 1,000 feet and can dive like a fish and putter along the bottom like a crab. It has made more than 2,000 dives off the West Coast and is widely used by industry and government agencies to handle risky underwater inspections and searches.

Varied Duties

From videotaping the condition of oil pipelines beneath the treacherous waters of Monterey Bay to searching for a sunken race boat last fall in the black depths of Nevada’s Lake Mead, Snooper has become one of the most recognizable fixtures of Southern California’s underwater world.

Siverts rents the sub a few times a month through his side business, Undersea Graphics Inc.

Several corporations own mini-submarines, and the Navy has several, but Siverts’ is one of only a handful of homemade subs in the country, diving experts say.

Don Keach of International Maritime Inc., who rents Snooper from Siverts for pipeline inspections, said the vessel “is a Model-T in that it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that some newer submersibles do, but it works.”

Siverts and his partners, dive shop operators Bob and Bill Meistrell, berth Snooper at the Port Royal Marina in Redondo Beach’s King Harbor. Snooper’s mother ship, the 41-foot vessel Mother Goose, has a launching bay to set Snooper in the water.

Although Siverts and Bob Meistrell are experienced divers, they say taking a whirl in Snooper is an adventure unlike any other.

Squeezed cozily into the 84-inch-high vessel, they have heard the clicking of friendly dolphins frolicking with the sub off the coast of Malibu, and they have spotted and recovered bodies from boating and diving accidents, a grim chore Snooper is occasionally called on to perform.

From a viewing porthole six feet high in the vessel’s snug tower, the sub’s driver usually cannot see the sea floor below him because of cloudy water. The driver relies on his partner, who lies on his stomach just inches below the driver’s chair, peering through portholes along the bottom and calling out commands.

“We rely on teamwork, but we still run smack into things all the time,” Siverts said. “We find a lot of stuff we’re looking for by barging right into it.”

Snooper’s maneuvering abilities allow it to tackle jobs that might otherwise be impossible, Siverts said.

Several years ago, Siverts was hired by an insurance company to find and help recover a sunken airplane off Catalina. Using a giant lasso attached to Snooper, Siverts snared the plane’s tail, and a powerful barge above the wreck hauled it out of the sea.

Searched Lake Mead

One of the sub’s most unusual jobs took place far from its ocean haunts, at the bottom of Nevada’s 462-foot-deep Lake Mead. Siverts was hired by a racing boat owner to find a costly vessel that sank during a race. After two days of searching the lake’s eerie, tree-covered bottom last fall, he gave up.

Siverts’ original partners, Glen Kapaun and Paul Gamrot, spent two years designing and building the sub with Siverts. Welding of the airtight hull was done by an outside company, but the three men did most of the other work.

Siverts said he has no idea what Snooper is worth, because most of the expense was in labor.

Snooper is powered with a one-of-a-kind propeller designed and built by Gene Miller, a Torrance neighbor of Siverts who is a retired North American Rockwell mechanical engineer.

Miller built Snooper’s gracefully curving propeller in his basement workshop. He is working on a second propeller that is expected to nearly double Snooper’s speed, from 1.7 to 3.2 m.p.h. The increased power will help the sub fight troublesome currents.

Miller also dreamed up a hydraulically operated mechanical arm and claw that were recently added to Snooper, replacing an electrical manipulator arm that had been fraught with problems. The new arm, capable of hoisting objects of up to 100 pounds from the ocean floor, so far has been used only to collect coral.

Recirculate Air

Another friend gave Siverts the idea for installing a system in the sub that can recirculate air for up to 48 hours, using a “scrubber” that removes carbon dioxide while pure oxygen is pumped in. The system is usually used for only three or four hours at a time, the duration of a typical dive.

Snooper’s ability to stay on the bottom for long periods is one reason for its commercial popularity, Siverts said. Before Snooper was built, he was often hired as a free-lance diver to inspect the Los Angeles County Sanitation District’s sewage discharge line in 220 feet of water off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“We could only stay down 13 minutes and had to decompress for an hour and 45 minutes after that so we wouldn’t get the bends,” Siverts recalled. “As time went on, they wanted us to go down deeper and stay longer, and we were getting older. Now the Snooper does all the work.”

Keenly aware of the sub’s abilities, Siverts and Meistrell are readying Snooper for a new adventure. They hope to explore the Southern California coast for sunken treasure.

Meistrell, who has invested in treasure-hunting expeditions in the Bahamas, Ecuador and Colombia, said little treasure has been recovered off Southern California.

“That’s because it’s too deep here. Divers can only stay down a few minutes and they don’t get a real good look. The Snooper could change all that.”

Large Safe

An old diving buddy who has since died told Meistrell of a large, locked, walk-in safe that he discovered submerged in 140 feet of water off Santa Catalina Island some years ago.

The friend wasn’t interested in salvaging the safe and its possible contents but passed the location along to Meistrell, who guards the information carefully. Meistrell and Siverts are getting ready to launch a meticulous search of the area where the safe was spotted.

Even if nothing turns up, the search will be far from a total loss, according to Meistrell. “The biggest treasure is just going down and being in the world underwater,” he said.

“Gold may not be out there, but what we’ve got is really beautiful.”