VIDEO: Deep Trekker finds harbour in low-cost sub market
Sam Macdonald recalls with a chuckle taking her company’s remotely operated submersible vehicle to Tobermory on the Victoria Day long weekend last year.
She plunked herself down on the dock, pulled the Deep Trekker out of a box and waited.
Within 15 minutes she was “swarmed” by curious boaters and salvage-craft operators.
Some persuasion was needed before she could hitch a ride on one of the salvage boats, but after the captain saw the Deep Trekker motoring around a sunken wreck and even cruising through a window, he bought one that weekend and so did an ice diver.
It’s been that way ever since Macdonald and her two partners, Jeff Lotz and Shawn Pette, started selling the Deep Trekker in 2011. Their company also is called Deep Trekker.
Once customers get a chance to see the versatile little machine in action, sending up crystal-clear video from as deep as 150 feet, they can’t wait to get their hands on one.
Deep Trekker’s first sale came all the way from Norway. Lotz, who designed and built the little sub, had posted photos on the company’s website.
A dealer in Norway, who supplies equipment to the booming fish farm industry in that country, spotted it and ordered one. Once he’d seen it in action inspecting fish cages and the eating patterns of fish, he ordered a few more. Norway is now the company’s biggest market.
“That scared me a little,” says Lotz, who wasn’t expecting his first customer to come from so far away.
The origins of the Deep Trekker go back to Lotz’s days as a mechanical engineering student at Conestoga College.
When a power boat roared past his canoe in the Kawartha Lakes, dumping the boat and all its contents, he resolved to build a remotely operated vehicle to retrieve the valuables. The vehicle would also serve as a school project.
His creation, the first Deep Trekker, took hundreds of hours to build and won an award at graduation ceremonies in 2003.
Lotz planned to further refine the sub for sale on the open market, but got so busy with his day job as a product designer at Tigercat Industries, a forestry equipment manufacturer in Cambridge, that he had to put the Deep Trekker on hold.
When work slowed during the recession of 2009, he turned his attention back to the little submersible. At that time, the cheapest remotely operated sub on the market sold for $10,000.
The son of a Fergus millwright, Lotz thought he could make one at a lower cost by eliminating one of three thrusters that power the vehicles below the surface. “I thought pretty long and hard on how to do that,” he says.
The design he came up with changed Deep Trekker from a cumbersome-looking, three-hulled craft into a smaller, circular vehicle with two thrusters and a band of glass around the middle where the camera sits.
Other innovations included a custom-made computer to process images, a high-brightness monitor to receive the images above the surface, batteries on board the sub and a lighter tether cable attached to the vehicle.
The resulting craft, which Lotz calls the DTG2 for Deep Trekker generation two, took about three years to develop in the basement of his Ayr area home.
A lymphoma cancer diagnosis slowed him down in 2011, but sales picked up last year after Lotz made a full recovery and Macdonald joined the company. A marketing veteran in high-tech, she boosts morale when design problems appear insurmountable.
” ‘Boys, how hard can it be?’ is my favourite line,” she says. “And next week, it’s done.”
Much of the credit has to go to Lotz, who has a remarkable work ethic, Macdonald says. “Jeff has more GSD – get stuff done – than anyone I have met in my entire life.”
The company’s website helped to spread the word along with its attendance at a diving show in Las Vegas and a yacht show in Fort Lauderdale. In 2012, the company sold 110 Deep Trekkers, ranging in cost from $3,000 to $7,500, and now has customers in 18 countries.
Customers have included the St. Lucie nuclear power plant in Florida and NASA, which uses a Deep Trekker to simulate a weightless environment underwater.
The company was bootstrapped using the founders’ own funds, and parts are designed in-house and sourced from suppliers in North America and Asia. Everything is tested and assembled in Ayr, including a water pressure test using a portable tank.
Deep Trekker, which has three part-time employees, in addition to the three partners, is looking to move to a larger facility in the spring.
Deep Trekker
3078 Greenfield Rd., Ayr
519-732-3257