10/12/2023 0 Comments Building a personal submarineThe wreck is a designated historic site: the City of Ainsworth was the third sternwheeler on Kootenay Lake and sank in dramatic conditions in a gale-force storm in 1898, taking nine lives as it did. City of Ainsworth, which sits nearly 400 feet down on the bottom of Kootenay Lake sometime in March or April. # e dives were testing the waters, so to speak, allowing Pronk to work out any bugs, and he is planning on taking the E3000 to the wreck of paddle steamer S.S. and the rest of Canada emerged from pandemic lockdowns this summer, Pronk has taken his submarines out for plunges in local lakes around the Kootenay, posting YouTube videos of manned dives with the AP-400 in Premier Lake in August and the E3000 in Kootenay Lake in September. ![]() # e E3000 and a newer, smaller submarine, the AP-400 (which Pronk built as an “isolation project” this year, while stuck at home during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, are the two most recent of the eight submarines he’s made over the past four decades, stretching back to when he was 16. “# ere’s one (other homemade submarine) in Honduras that is close, but it’s not quite equal,” Pronk told the Pioneer, adding his submarine has been pressured tested to depths of 2,900 feet in a pressure chamber in Vancouver. Indeed one of Pronk’s latest submarines, the Elementary 3000 (or E3000), is in fact the deepest diving homemade crewed submarine in the world. He’s much more literally a deep fellow: Pronk builds homemade submarines and then uses them to plumb the depths of local lakes. ![]() No, that doesn’t mean he’s the kind of guy who likes inquisitive philosophic discussions over campfi res. You could say Fairmont resident Hank Pronk is a deep fellow.
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