 It’s
The Hunt for Red October, UCSD style! Last summer, a team of undergraduates
from the Jacobs School of Engineering competed against six other
universities and one high school from across the U.S. and Canada
in the 2004 Human Powered Submarine Contest.
A product of meticulous engineering and pure whimsy, UCSD’s
neon green, propeller-driven 120-pound submarine raced to a first
place finish in its category at
the Offshore Model Basin in Escondido. The one-person, pedal-powered
submarine “Inviscid” (meaning “frictionless flow”)
clocked in at a whopping 6.035 miles per hour. UCSD also won second
place in operation and third place in the submarine manufacture and
safety consciousness categories. “We’ve tried to keep
our submarine simple and robust,” says John McCague ’05,
captain and mechanical engineering major.
 The
contest, sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineering,
requires participants to be diver-certified and submarines to be
completely made from scratch. Each team must also raise its own
funds to design and construct their model. And obviously our own
intrepid Triton submariners rose to the occasion ... or should we
say sank for the occasion? 
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