Romancing engineers at the submarine races

Some see event as way to recruit future military engineers

By Garance Burke ~ The Washington Post

They came in flippers and wetsuits, even a mermaid tail, intent on powering their submarines through a giant pool of water.

For the past week, teams of engineering students from Wheaton, Md., to Veracruz, Mexico, lined up at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Md., for the biennial submarine races. Typically the basin at the Carderock division is used to test whether submarines are really gliding without making a sound or whether commercial ships can withstand an onslaught of pounding waves.

Friday it was filled with devices cobbled together from fiberglass, scuba tanks and bicycle parts, all hand-built and human-powered for the Seventh International Submarine Races.

"Any change in your medical condition since yesterday?" barked Jim Corry, the former director of the Secret Service's underwater program and "dive supe" for the event, as contestants prepared for the race.

A University of Maryland team stepped onto the partially submerged inclined ramp. One diver pointed his thumb downwards, scuba-style, and the team was slowly lowered into the 3,200-foot-long basin and began pushing its fiberglass vessel through the water to the starting line.

"It gets cold after you've been in the water for a while because you're trapping water inside your wet suit," said Brian Foltz, 23, a support diver for the team's mini submarine.

Room for two

The submarine, which students built as part of a mechanical engineering course, has just enough room for two: The pilot lies face down on the boat's fiberglass hull, while the "propulsor," who provides the energetic force to move the boat down the 100-meter track, sits upright, pedaling like mad. Each wears a mask and scuba tank to breathe underwater.

Andrew Petrella, 22, an engineering student from Mount Airy, Md., was just hoping the boat's controls functioned properly. But as with many of the 200 engineer-athletes participating, his enthusiasm was notable.

"This is awesome," Petrella said. "I mean, this is way better than working on your bike or your car."

The contest's aim is relatively simple: to produce an underwater vessel that moves forward powered by human energy alone. This was not easy, however: Many of the small subs malfunctioned, crashed to the bottom, veered off course or simply never moved at all.

"It's really cold, and you have to get the boat to go straight at the same time as you're pedaling as fast as you can," said Logan Rainard, 20, of Wheaton, who won an award for the fastest independent, one-person, propeller-driven sub. Rainard propelled Scuba-doo using only a cut-down bicycle frame, with which he reached a speed of 4.875 knots, or approximately 5 mph. "We just pretty much built this thing in our neighbor's garage, and it's always a shock when we do that well," he said.

15 years old

Race director Jerry Rovner said designs have improved significantly since the competition began 15 years ago. "Some use Plexiglas, some use fiberglass," he said, racing down the narrow concrete passageway alongside the basin, checking a hand-held TV monitor to see whether he needed to send in Navy rescue divers after contestants. "We've had steel, we've had Kevlar, we've seen it all."

One of the most innovative designs this year was a contraption that left the Virginia Tech team's Amy Linklater, 22, looking very much like a mermaid. While she wriggled her lower body into a dark blue neoprene skirt, teammates strapped her into a light blue fiberglass nose cone, just large enough for her head and arms. She then strapped her feet into a plastic kicking device nicknamed "the dolphin tail."

For Bill Day, who heads the resistance and powering department at Carderock, the event was a chance to recruit a brain trust of future engineers for the armed forces.

"It's not so much that they're learning how to design a mermaid tail or a set of flippers. They're learning about energy, and it's an excellent way to get young people into engineering. That's a preparedness that I think will serve us well," he said.

As they prepared for the races, Linklater and her boyfriend, Adam Maisano, also a contestant, endured their share of kidding. After all, young couples intent on romance used to say they were going to "watch the submarine races."

"I got jokes about it a lot last year," said Maisano, 23, "but we've been really busy all week, so it hasn't quite been the normal relationship."