Sleeping with the fishes

Bruce Jones has $40 million invested to build a luxury hotel where the rooms will be submerged 50 feet under the sea off Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas.

Unlike the Jules Undersea Lodge -- an undersea hotel located off the coast of Key Largo, Fla. -- guests at the Poseidon won't need to put on a wet suit and dive to their accommodations. They can glide to their $1,500-a-night underwater abodes by escalator.

Each room will feature transparent acrylic walls that look out onto coral gardens, Jacuzzis, controls allowing guests to adjust the lighting of the world outside their windows and to release food for fish swimming just outside.

Jones surely doesn't ignore the depressing track record of undersea hotels.
In late Seventies, French architect Jacques Rougerie constructed three underwater habitats, though none ever made it into the water. He has also designed an undersea village for the Virgin Islands that has yet to be realized.

Over the last decade, ocean enthousiasts dreamed up Ocean Base One, an undersea research station that could be extended off the back of a roaming ship or sit on the continental shelf about 600 feet below the surface. But that project has also been stalled, due to a lack of funding.

Hydropolis, is under way in Dubai. The underwater complex would feature a luxurious hotel with 220 underwater suites, 66 feet below the surface in the Persian Gulf. The $500 a night rooms would include access to underwater entertainment within the complex's concert auditorium, ballroom and restaurants.

Problem is that the project's planners have only secured a fraction of the funding needed to start building.

Via ABC News.