A group of Australians are celebrating after taking a weekend drive across the bottom of Darwin Harbour.
A team of dozens of engineers and divers completed the feat on Saturday after refurbishing a 1978 Toyota Land Cruiser, swapping in an electric motor that was waterproofed for the 12-and-a-half-hour trip, project leader Tom Lawrence said on Tuesday.
About 30 divers took turns driving along the bottom of the harbor, slipping to depths of 30m on an 8km route that was slightly longer than planned after the vehicle, baptized the “mudcrab,” was “blown off course,” Lawrence told reporters.
“There’s quite notoriously big crocodiles and tiger sharks in the Darwin Harbour, but there’s also box jellyfish and irukandji [jellyfish] as well,” he said, describing some of the dangers faced during the feat.
“It’s always a risk, but no one was particularly concerned about it,” he said. “A giant, orange Land Cruiser driving around under the water is probably not the sort of thing wildlife would swim towards.”
It was the first successful underwater car crossing of Darwin Harbour after a previous attempt in 1983 that relied on an old diesel motor and giant snorkels stopped about halfway, Lawrence said.
Asked about why they made the attempt, he said: “We just asked ourselves that on repeat, especially for the last three months [it took] to rebuild it.”
Ultimately, the team plan to make a documentary about Land Cruisers and Australian car culture, he said.
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