A lightweight apparatus for performing ultrasonic immersion inspection of a workpiece in an arbitrary orientation that uses significantly less couplant and has a reduced footprint size while providing ultrasonic performance levels comparable to those typically reached using immersion tanks, bubblers, or Dripless Bubblers™ while accommodating large and small ultrasonic beamwidths. The apparatus can be used with manual, automated, or electronic scanning techniques. The apparatus provides a quickly enabled ultrasonic coupling means that minimizes the area of the part wetted, and also can recover spent couplant. As a result, this reduces the number and type of contaminates to which the workpiece is exposed when used when compared to prior art immersion tanks and bubblers.