How This Woman Started Diving in DIY Subs

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[Reporter] Some people are hardwired to love the ocean,

spending days swimming and surfing and sailing,

but for this marine biologist, that's not immersive enough.

She prefers to be far below the surface,

exploring the seas in experimental submarines.

My favorite thing is being underwater.

I've spent a whole year of my life underwater now in hours,

9,000 hours underwater.

For me, it's pure magic and I feel like

I could just live there forever.

Hands down, I'm completely obsessed.

It's all I wanna do with my life.

My name is Shanee Stopnitzky

and I'm a submarine mother and pilot.

[Reporter] In 2018, Shanee left her PhD program

in marine biology so she could share her passion

for underwater exploration with others.

She raised money to buy two submarines,

Noctiluca and a homemade sub called Fangtooth.

Yes, an actual yellow submarine.

We bought Fangtooth for $4,000. [laughs]

So funny to me that you could just go

buy a submarine for $4,000. [laughs]

[Reporter] Both are named after sealife.

Fangtooth is this monstrous deepsea fish

and Noctiluca scintillans is a bioluminescent dinoflagellate

responsible for this sea sparkle.

Each submarine has its own character

and its own things that it can do

and so we wanna have sort of one of each style

so that people could work on the ones

that resonate the most with them.

Yeah I mean I think that we need to replace

all the pneumatic valves.

[Reporter] But both subs needed a lot of work,

work that Shanee and her team took on themselves.

My credentials are none. [laughs]

The thing with these types of projects is that

they are as serious as people take them.

It's a combination of boating

and various art and engineering projects

that I've engaged in over the last five years

that have given me confidence to be able to approach

a project like this,

but I'm in a state of learning for sure.

Right now this project is a hobby and not a job.

I hope to one day to be able to get paid

because it's a lot of hours.

Normally I work as a marine scientist

and I do this as a hobby.

But they are all are bent weird.

That was a big leak.

We're trying to get the subs perfectly operational

so that we can use them to train people

and to give people the experience of

a) being able to dive at all and b) of empowering people

to do the operations themselves.

[Reporter] Fangtooth is Shanee's first experimental sub.

It's homemade, built by a man in his garage

with parts he got at the hardware store.

He sold it and it eventually ended up

in the hands of Shanee and her team.

They've taken it out on about 50 dives,

but it's still a work in progress.

Fangtooth, we dive to about 30 feet max

and that's because of the way

that her front view port isn't dome.

You know, the pressure from the outside

sort of will bend the acrylic over that piece.

It was a not super well thought out design

so she's limited to just 30 feet.

So Fangtooth is like our accessible little toy submarine.

It's just a really simple system.

There's a few levers.

You add water, you add compressed air, that's it.

[Reporter] Fangtooth's mechanics are pretty easy to use.

It has four Ballast tanks filled with air;

two in the front, one in the center and one in the back.

These keep the sub afloat on the surface,

but when Shanee releases air from the Ballast tanks

and floods them with water,

it weighs down Fangtooth and lets it sink.

[Shanee] As soon as I'm under the water,

I go from being a little bit nervous to having

just this total profound calmness and contentedness.

As soon as we're submerged, the scene is,

you know, the hatch is underwater,

I transition from feeling you know,

anxious about what's going on

and worrying about all the controls

to just feeling this extreme sense of peace.

[Reporter] When she's ready to surface, she slowly refills

the Ballast tanks with air that she brings down with her,

making Fangtooth buoyant again.

She's also just really cute and fun.

People that normally would be really intimidated

by all of the mechanics, just to see this thing

and have it feel like more psychologically accessible

because of its playfulness.

[birds cawing]

Fangtooth is not yellow anymore

'cause we never wanna hear the Beatles' song again

and so Fangtooth got painted white as the base coat

for her new paint job where she's gonna get painted

by a street artist and will be a much more accessible

little creature than she was before

with her Captain America shield.

[Reporter] Fangtooth is considered

an experimental class submarine.

There are commercially available submarines,

but they come with a price tag of a few million dollars

largely because of the costly certification process.

But with Fangtooth and other experimental class subs,

DIYers like Shanee skip over these steps.

So in the United States,

I would estimate that there are maybe

30 experimental class subs.

It's hard to gauge 'cause a lot of people do it

without telling other people,

but of the active community

that is around sort of DIY stuff,

I would say there are probably 30

in various states of repair and disrepair in the US.

But you can't just buy them usually.

You have to sort of demonstrate your competence

so that you know, whoever built the sub originally

doesn't wanna have to worry

that something terrible's gonna happen

so you kind of need to be a part

of the community before it's even an option.

It's not usually an option to just show up and buy one.

I was very persuasive. [laughs]

They're actually way safer than people think they are,

but of course you could die.

I mean you're in a steel capsule in the depths.

Like you could conceivably die,

but it's actually way safer than people have in their mind

and it's just because there's so much mitigation

for everything that could possibly go wrong.

We are going to have a max bottom time of 15 minutes.

After 20 minutes, please initiate a rescue.

[Reporter] Noctiluca is Shanee

and her group's second submarine.

Originally it was commissioned by the Swedish army

and then it passed through the hands of

the Antiwhaling activists group

the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society,

and then it ended up here

with some amateur submarine enthusiasts.

Noctiluca currently has a couple area leaks

in the pneumatic system and the high pressure air systems.

We have a minor hydraulic leak.

It's just little things that pop up all the time.

A couple gauges are down and so we're just

trying to replace every single little component

to make sure that she's really ready to go.

The sea trial is just a lot of testing

of what to expect when you're out in the field

and then to be able to prepare accordingly.

Hey service crew, I opened the panel

and it is indeed leaking.

Noctiluca was tested to a crush depth of 1,200 feet

which means given the safety factor in the time

that she was built, that's a rated depth of 300 feet.

We're hoping to do some retrofitting

to enable her to go deeper, but she has a ding

in her front view port.

We need to replace her front view port

before we can go to her fully rated depth

and then we hope to get a beefier view port

that will allow us to go deeper

and then there's just a few more mods

that we'd have to make to allow her to go much more deeper.

We are preparing to ascend.

[Reporter] Turns out Shanee and her crew

aren't the only ones interested

in exploring the oceans with Fangtooth.

So Fangtooth was stolen.

It was very hectic for a few hours

as I called every single law enforcement person

and asked them if they had actually

yes for real seen a yellow submarine, I wasn't joking,

and they all were like, No, are you kidding?

Like that's not funny.

Like no, no, no, I'm serious, yellow submarine.

Someone could be dying in there right now.

It's kind of actually important.

And so I was really frantic because I was scared

someone was gonna get hurt so it's super easy

to get yourself into trouble

if you don't know how to rescue yourself out of these things

and so I was very relieved to hear that she had been

retrieved by the Emeryville police.

[Reporter] Shanee continues to work on

Fangtooth and Noctiluca,

bringing them both closer to her vision,

and she actually wants to buy more submarines,

but for her, it's not just about teaching the public

how to work on and pilot these underwater vessels.

When you go on a sub dive, there are all of these

gelatinous creatures that have absolutely nothing in common

with anything you've ever seen before

and they're absolutely magical

when they just have all of these behaviors and textures

and colors that have nothing, no relationships

to any land creatures and it's utterly captivating

to see these things that are truly,

they're aliens on our own planet.

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