Florida couple plan for life under the sea

Jim Waymer - 

Chamberlands live under the sunny, blue skies of west Cocoa. Soon, they hope to gaze up through aqua-gray tints of Atlantica, the world's first permanent undersea colony.

They're determined to do so by 2015, somewhere off East Central Florida, maybe even Brevard County. They've signed up 13 others to live with them in cylindrical steel modules, 200 feet down and tapping into the Gulf Stream for energy, oxygen and scientific discovery.

The Chamberlands envision quarters safe enough for children. Even their cat, Snickers, will go with them, transported in a submarine-like cylinder with a glass bubble port.

"Now we seem to be focused and preoccupied on space, but the ocean cultures are coming and they're coming fast," said Dennis Chamberland, a contract manager for NASA who's designed prototypes of advanced life support systems for the moon and Mars. "It's inevitable."

The 59-year-old is quick to point out that NASA isn't involved in his project, dubbed the Atlantica Expeditions. But for Chamberland, pioneering the first undersea colony would fulfill a lifelong crusade -- what he describes as the inborn "splinter" in his mind.

"I just never turned loose of it," he said of his childhood dream.

But the notion is far from child's play or fantasy. The Chamberlands say they're less than two years from a record-setting dry run of long-term undersea living.

Along with a fellow aquanaut, and their pet, they hope to submerge for 90 days in an undersea habitat called Leviathan on July 4, 2012. The stay would break the world record of 69 days, set in 1991 in the Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo.

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