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How This Woman Started Diving in DIY Submarines

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A marine biologist walked away from her Ph.D. to build submarines out of scrap parts and community fundraising.

Shanee Stopnitzky was deep into a doctoral program in marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, when she decided the lab wasn’t where she wanted to be. In 2018, she left academia to chase something stranger and more hands-on: rebuilding derelict personal submersibles and getting ordinary people underwater in them. What started as an obsession with one broken sub turned into a full-blown project to make undersea exploration something more than a rich person’s hobby.

• Stopnitzky left her marine biology Ph.D. program at UC Santa Cruz in 2018 to build and rehabilitate DIY submersibles full-time.
• She founded the Community Submersibles Project, restoring two used, broken subs — “Fangtooth” and “Noctiluca” — to teach citizen science and affordable ocean access.
• Fangtooth was stolen from the Berkeley Marina in May 2018, drifted into San Francisco Bay, and was recovered by police before Stopnitzky repainted it white.

Leaving the Lab for the Workshop

Stopnitzky is one of the few prominent women working inside the small, insular world of DIY submersible builders — a scene made up mostly of hobbyists who scavenge parts, weld their own hulls, and troubleshoot life-support systems by trial and error. Rather than finish her doctorate, she chose to put that scientific training toward something she could build with her hands: vessels that ordinary people, not just research institutions or billionaires, could actually operate.

That decision led to the Community Submersibles Project, her initiative built around three goals — citizen science, affordable access to the ocean, and training members of the public to pilot and maintain undersea vessels themselves. To get it off the ground, she raised funds and tracked down two used submarines that were, by any normal standard, junk: Fangtooth and Noctiluca.

Rebuilding Fangtooth and Noctiluca

Restoring the two subs meant rebuilding the systems that actually keep a pilot alive underwater — life support, ballast, and electrical — largely through hands-on experimentation and help from the wider submersible community rather than an engineering manual. Working out of the San Francisco Bay Area, Stopnitzky mechanically reengineered both craft from the hull up.

Fangtooth became the more famous of the two for reasons that had nothing to do with diving. In May 2018, the sub was stolen from the Berkeley Marina and drifted loose into San Francisco Bay before police recovered it and hauled it to an impound lot. It was eventually returned to Stopnitzky, who repainted the once bright-yellow craft white afterward.

“I never want to hear the song ‘Yellow Submarine’ again,” Stopnitzky joked, explaining why Fangtooth came back from the impound lot in a fresh coat of white paint.

Building a Different Kind of Ocean Access

What separates Stopnitzky’s project from the usual narrative of underwater exploration — deep-pocketed explorers commissioning custom subs — is the emphasis on community. The Community Submersibles Project isn’t chasing record depths or headline-grabbing dives; it’s aimed at people who’d never otherwise get access to a submersible cockpit, teaching them the maintenance and piloting skills that keep a homemade sub from becoming a liability like Fangtooth briefly was in the bay.

It’s a scrappier cousin to the bigger, well-funded submersible world covered elsewhere — the kind of engineering ambition you see in stories about makeshift subs built for entirely different purposes, or in the gear-heavy world of divers seeking out unusual underwater terrain. Stopnitzky’s version runs on donated parts, borrowed expertise, and a lot of patience with saltwater corrosion.

Fangtooth is back in the water now, repainted and rewired, with Noctiluca undergoing the same treatment. Stopnitzky’s still the one turning wrenches on both of them — and still, by her own account, not eager to hear a certain Beatles song anytime soon.