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Historical Underwater Habitat Showcase, Part 10: La Chalupa, aka Jules Undersea Lodge
🕑 Added 2019-02-28 07:34:48 +0000 UTC
To this day, the La Chalupa is considered the best design for an underwater habtitat. It rolled all the lessons learned from prior habitats into one unit, and benefited greatly from those design improvements.
The wet porch of Lap Chalupa is sealed off from the living areas by sliding doors, which prevent the spread of humidity. The entire habitat is shaped like a barge so it can be towed from place to place, with ballast tanks so that it can alter its own buoyancy.
Only the two cylindrical modules and the box shaped wet porch between them were air filled. The rest of the rectilinear, barge shaped hull was filled with concrete to weigh it down, as well as the three ballast tanks.
This makes it one of the more spacious habitats ever built, second only to the likes of Conshelf 2, 3, and Tektite II. La Chalupa was developed by Ian Koblic, built in the early 1970s and operated off Puerto Rico at a depth of 500 feet.
Koblick, not wanting his brainchild to be scrapped when funding ran dry, later refurbished it into the Jules Undersea Lodge. A two room hotel which began operations in the 1980s and has continued to this day.
During those three decades, the Jules has had over 10,000 guests, including many celebrities. It is the only actual fully underwater hotel in the world, and must be accessed by scuba diving. This puts it in its own category above hotels which merely have a single room with a window looking into the pool or an aquarium.
Because of this, Koblick used to utilize hookah diving rigs so guests could enter without needing scuba certification. This amounts to a regulator on the end of a long hose, connected to a compressor on the surface. But changing regulations and safety concerns led to the end of this practice. You now must be scuba certified to enter.
Having been relocated from Puerto Rico to an inland lagoon that's just 30 feet deep, you won't require much in the way of decompression time to surface safely. But the water becomes a murky green in the Summer due to algae blooms. In December it's clear and blue, but the water of course is quite cold.
Koblick has long had a partnership with a nearby pizza joint, such that guests staying underwater at the Jules Lodge can have fresh hot pizza delivered by a scuba diver using a water proof case. A twist valve permits pressure to be equalized between the inside and outside of the case, else it would be impossible to open at depth.
The Jules may not seem that impressive compared to 3D renders of supposed upcoming undersea hotels in Dubai, for example. But those don't exist and never get built. Jules actually exists, right now, and has been in continuous operation for about 30 years.
It's a real honest to goodness underwater habitat built during the golden age of Man in the Sea programs, a sort of living museum that anybody with the $600 per night it costs can go and live in for 24 hours. That's long enough to be considered an aquanaut according to PADI and the only way most people can feasibly obtain that certification.
Anyway that's all for this time. Stay tuned for future installments!
