A Florida man's dream to build a 100-foot-long submarine has formally ended after workers hauled the giant steel tube out of a Keys mangrove swamp to be hacked up and recycled.
Known locally as the "Yellow Submarine" even though it had mostly rusted to a dirty red, the former piece of industrial equipment was the pipe dream of a Marathon resident who envisioned turning the windowless tube into an eco-tourism attraction.
But the man's efforts ran squarely into that old nautical saying: A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.
The vessel had been tucked in a canal on a tiny island called Boot Key since the late 1990s. The then-owner told a reporter in 2008 that he'd rescued the steel vessel from a Chicago scrapyard and had it barged to the Keys, where he planned to renovate it into a powered submarine. He described floating around the erstwhile vessel on a homemade raft and predicted he was close to being finished.
But 17 years later, contractors this week surrounded the rusting 100-ton tube with rigging and float bags so they could haul it ashore for recycling.
