SwiftVets.com

[SBD]

Suit is one of few things settled regarding lost sub

By Onell R. Soto
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
November 6, 2005

Where is the Looking Glass?

The 65-foot-long yellow submarine was supposed to arrive in San Diego a few years ago to take up to 46 tourists at a time on hourlong undersea adventures.

Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers
Pilot Hugo Marrero (right) and Geoff Oldfather showed off the submarine Looking Glass in Florida in 2000. The ship, bought by local investors, was reportedly lost at sea.
A Mexican tugboat, the Rosarito, left Cabo San Lucas towing the Looking Glass and a 35-foot tender, the Mary Margaret, on April 5, 2002.
Five days later, the Rosarito returned alone.

Its captain, Ernesto Garfias Ramirez, said a freak storm claimed the ships his tug was towing a day and a half into the 1,000-mile journey, about five miles off Baja California, 100 miles north of Cabo San Lucas.

But the owners of the Looking Glass are unconvinced.

They spent more than $3.5 million to buy and refurbish the sub and get approval to take tourists underwater, only to have the effort end with word that their dream was gone.

"I have some serious questions about it," said Marvin Kottman, an aerospace dealer who led the group of investors behind the Looking Glass. "We're not sure it actually sank."

He sued the tugboat company and its owner in San Diego federal court. At the very least, Kottman hoped to get his investment back. At best, a trial would suss out what happened to the submarine.

Now that's out of the question.

Kottman and the towing company he sued recently settled the lawsuit.

"The whole trial became so expensive that we just, as a group, we decided to throw in the towel," he said.

The settlement paid for legal bills, but that's about it, Kottman said in a telephone interview from his office in Nebraska.

Joseph Mirkovich, a lawyer for tugboat operator Porteadores del Noroeste and its owner, Héctor Fernando Margaín Velarde, said the settlement made sense.

The lawsuit has ended for "far less" than the $200,000 it would have required in lawyers fees to defend the case, he said.


Overhaul in Florida
The settlement was the end of Kottman's plans for the Looking Glass, one of two tourist submarines built in a Scottish shipyard in 1988.
The submarine was equipped with large viewing windows and could go 250 feet deep. It dove for about two years off St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, until its original owners went bankrupt after another company brought in a competing submarine.

It was bought by a French company and languished for years before Kottman's group bought it and took it to Florida for an overhaul in 1999.

"It was a beautiful submarine," said Bruce Jones, whose company, U.S. Submarines, worked on the overhaul.

The owners showed the sub off to the media in West Palm Beach, Fla., in July 2000, and said they planned to charge up to $99 for a ride.

"It's been a long time coming, and I am very excited," Kottman told a reporter at the time. "It's really a little more luxury than what most people think of submarines."

The Looking Glass was to become the first tourist submarine in the continental United States, one of about 40 submarines worldwide that take some 2 million tourists aboard every year.

It had lights for night dives, tubes that spat out food to draw fish closer and a floating robot that could take pictures of passengers through its large windows.

But no paying Florida passenger ever boarded the craft.

A federal law dating to 1886 bans foreign-built ships from transporting passengers within the United States. Kottman and his group applied for a waiver from the Coast Guard, but, after waiting more than a year, moved the sub to Cabo San Lucas, hoping to set up their business in Mexico.

Again, they couldn't get the approvals.

Kottman says he was "grossly misled" by a Mexican official into going there.

"We just decided after . . . a lot of wasted effort down there to get the submarine out of Mexico," he said.

San Diego is the closest United States port, and the application for the waiver from the 1886 law was still pending. He had conversations with officials about perhaps operating the submarine around Santa Catalina Island.

And so he contacted Porteadores del Noroeste, a tugboat company.


Lost at sea?
On April 5, 2002, the Mary Margaret towed the sub to the Rosarito, waiting outside the Cabo San Lucas harbor to begin the trip north.
A tow line was tied to the Mary Margaret, which in turn was towing the Looking Glass, according to the minutes of a meeting the ship's crew had with port officials in Cabo San Lucas a week later.

Everything was going well until about 10:40 p.m. the following day, when they encountered a storm, Capt. Garfias Ramirez said in the sworn statement. Waves broke over the submarine and the Mary Margaret.

Less than an hour later, with the wind blowing 30 mph, the waves swamped the Mary Margaret and it went under, pulling the submarine with it, the captain said.

The crew shined its lights where the two ships were supposed to be, but saw nothing but fog, water and 12-foot waves, he said.

The tugboat began to heel in the direction of the tow line.

Fearing for the lives of his six-person crew, the captain ordered the 2-inch-thick tow lines be cut.

"The waves were very strong," Garfias Ramirez told the port officials.

For 24 hours, the crew looked for the sub and the tender to no avail.

The tugboat company's owner called Kottman with the news.

"I didn't think it was going to be that big a problem," he recalled. "Submarines were meant to go underwater."

He expected to find the sub bobbing from the line tied to the Mary Margaret. But then he learned the captain reported the sub sank in 2,700-foot-deep water – more than 10 times deeper than it is meant to dive.

He checked with Jones, the sub expert, about the captain's account.

"It would be relatively difficult for that to happen," Jones said. The sub was airtight, and its ballast tanks – used to control its descent – had no water in them.

Kottman said he also checked the weather reports.

"All the satellite photos taken during that time period don't show a cloud in the sky in the entire region," he said.

The more he learned, the less he knew.

In the midst of that, a few weeks after Kottman's group heard of the Looking Glass's demise, the Coast Guard came through with its approval, allowing the sub to operate from U.S. ports.

Now, three years later, Kottman still doesn't know what happened.

"I'm not convinced that it sunk," he said. "I'm not convinced that it did not sink."

Jones said the Looking Glass is useless except as a tourist attraction.

It couldn't go very fast, or very far, and it wouldn't be good for smuggling. "It's bright yellow," he said.

Mirkovich, the tug owner's lawyer, said he doesn't doubt the sub sank, if for no other reason than the fact that it hasn't been seen since.

"If it didn't sink, it would have been visible to somebody, someplace," he said.

Besides, he said, there's no reason for his client to hide what happened to the sub.

"He got nothing out of it," he said. "The only thing he got out of it was a headache and to pay my attorney's fees."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Onell Soto: (619) 293-1280; onell.soto@uniontrib.com


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20051106-9999-1m6sub.html