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[ScottW]

Discovering the Saga submarine, the largest "yellow submarine" in the worldPublished on August 2, 2021
Par Maxime Leriche

https://www.boatsnews.com/story/37642/discovering-the-saga-submarine-the-largest-yellow-submarine-in-the-world

At the bend in a little street in Marseille, no one expects to discover such a vessel, waiting wisely in its hangar. The Saga, the largest civilian submarine in the world, is at the center of all the attentions of the association "Les Compagnons du Saga".

Its construction was launched by Captain Cousteau in 1966, under the name Argyronet. But due to lack of budget, the project was abandoned and taken over by Comex and Ifremer in the 1980s.

Renamed Saga, the objective of this submersible is to be able to intervene in the deep offshore, while ensuring autonomy allowing it to go to the diving areas by its own means. It is intended to work in the oil offshore, technological and scientific research and the public sector (Governments, Military Marines). The result is impressive.

[RST]

Thanks for the read.  I'm sure I was aware of this sub before.

I worked with a few ex-comex guys over the years.  Have you seen this website?


http://www.anciencomex.com/pagesen/9_la_vie_du_clubpag.html

I thought I'd read up on it on that page above but it's not obvious looking now.  But there is a little pic of it very top right corner, next to the Tricolor and Union flag.

Rich

[ScottW]

Thanks!
Cool.

Have you seen this website?

No, I haven't. In large part because I only recognize about a dozen words of French.

[RST]

LoL, I'm only fluent in about 12 myself and 6 of them can't be used at the dinner table.  Click on the union flag if your browser doesn't automatically offer to convert.

Actually to be fair I don't think it's a well-known website.  Most of the comex guys I knew didn't know about it either, and some of them are in the pics or the videos.  If anyone has an interest in sat. diving it's a good read.  The DSV I worked on is the boat very top left (the Seacom, sister to Seabex One), but she had been through allot of changes by the time I was Field Engineer -she's razor blades now any way along with the Seabex I think (whatever here final name was -she changed hands a fair bit).

The idea of mixing sat diving and submersibles has been tried a few times, usually with same result as far as I know.  There were two "flying diving bells" that used to sit in the CSO yard in Aberdeen for years which were apparently a huge white elephant (I was told they were over 20M punds worth of kit just sitting having only been in the water a few times but that was only what I was told).  There might be some more info on the Saga1 by E-Mailing the club.  But I don't think the website has been updated for years and if you find the "submarine" section they only mention 2 other subs, I think from the text they are quite reliant on what ex-employees have provided.

It's interesting to see it resurfaced again though.

Rich

Wow, I just randomly remembered they were "Stena-Bruker" flying bells though I could have sworn they were taller but maybe they were sitting on stands.  Checking google finds this!

http://www.genart.eu/project/part2.pdf.

[RST]

Just found more info on Saga here though most of the technical description is in French, there are some diagrams of internal layout...

https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/1990/acte-1166.pdf

*EDIT*  I just found out although it's a scan of an old paper, I can copy and paste the paragraphs into Google translate.

[ScottW]

Interesting stuff.
And I will admit in public to being happy to be provoking things/memories. 

[ScottW]

Oh, talking diver lock outs from submarines, brings to mind a book I recently finally got around to getting.
Somewhere in its early pages there is mention of USN deciding to discontinue the diver lockout chamber on I forget if it was the Holland or Simon Lake designs because the USN people at that time couldn't imagine any future reason that submarines would need to deploy divers.

Ah, there is part of it, page 39, "Lake argued that divers might be as important as torpedoes because ..."

And now we have both diver chambers and diver-carrying minisubs which dock to the big boats. Simon Lake was on to something.

[RST]

Hi Scott,

It seems the Saga is not just in name alone.  I only started scanning through this so far...

"Submarine project in dispute France, Canada clash over firm’s unpaid taxes"

https://cns-snc.ca/media/uploads/branch_data/branches/quebec/saga_n/SAGA_N.html

Rich

[ScottW]

Some nice models and paintings illustrate that.