On an island in Honduras, a Yankee explorer builds his own subs, brings people to the ocean floor in them, and pisses off the locals

Karl Stanley’s homemade submarine has sprung a leak.

It’s a discovery both fortuitous and disconcerting. Fortuitous because I notice it as we bob on the surface of the placid Caribbean Sea, just 100m off the Honduran island of Roatán. Disconcerting because it’s 8:30pm and we’re about to spend the night 500m down searching for the six-gill shark, an enigmatic 5m, 600kg predator that patrols those depths.

“That’s just the O-ring,” Stanley reassures me as water wells up in the window and drips to the floor. The rubber washer meant to seal the window is feeling a touch rebellious. “It doesn’t have enough compression on it.”

The words homemade and submarine aren’t commonly paired, but Stanley, a 34-year-old self-taught engineer, has built two DIY subs, safely logging more than 1,000 dives. Still, sitting in the Idabel, the cramped three-person craft he built on a shoestring, I can’t help but recall that a faulty O-ring caused the space shuttle Challenger, with its NASA PhD’s and multi-billion-dollar budget, to blow up.

Stanley casually throws me a towel to wipe up the moisture. “Hopefully it will fix itself under pressure,” he says, turning a handle that allows the ballast tanks to fill with water. We begin to sink into unexplored darkness.

Our descent accelerates into free fall and bioluminescent plankton bounce off the submarine, exploding in a blizzard of light. At 30m the leak seals – as Stanley predicted – and I feel better about the prospect of finding one of the sharks, which we hope will be attracted by our gruesome hood ornament, a pig’s head tied to the front of the submarine.

We dive through the photic zone, a fertile band of water shallow enough for the sun’s rays to power photosynthesis. To my right sits Martyna Mierzejewska, a 30-year-old Polish-Canadian dive instructor who put down US$500 for the privilege of role-playing a canned sardine. Stanley, tall and thin like the coconut trees that line the beach near his home on Roatán’s Half Moon Bay, stands in the turret of the L-shaped submarine, driving.

At 200m, we leave the photic zone, crossing the ocean’s Mason-Dixon line toward the deep sea, the largest ecosystem on the planet, where life is defined by a dearth of sunlight. Stanley celebrates the crossing with a game of interspecies Morse code, flashing the sub’s lights to stimulate the pulsating plankton, which respond by burning brighter.

At 500m, the sub is subjected to more than 700 pounds per square inch – nearly 50 times the pressure at sea level – and the water temperature has dropped from 26 degrees to about five degrees.

This is the netherworld that Stanley affectionately refers to as “my zone.”

“If you add up the man-hours spent between 300m and 600m,” he boasts, with equal parts honesty and self-aggrandizement, “I’m dominating that category. If I haven’t been there before, no one in the history of humankind ever has.”

Stanley’s been taking paying customers down in his homemade subs for a decade. He’s an explorer and an inventor, not a diplomat, and the audacity that serves him so well in the deep can alienate others on land.

“Karl has a very scientific mind,” says his friend Jeff Thekan, 55, who sells real estate on Utila, an island neighboring Roatán. “He only sees things in black and white. There’s no gray, and that can get him into trouble.” Stanley has spent much of his 10 years on the island feuding with his neighbor on the island, and the vice mayor wants him deported, her husband leveled death threats against him, and last May he spent a night in jail.

“He’s pissed off the wrong people,” says another friend, 26-year-old American expat Kristen Davis. “I wouldn’t say he is well liked, but few pioneers are.”

In Stanley’s element – 500m underwater – politics don’t matter and we proceed with our shark hunt. Six-gills sharks have weak jaws, which requires them to tear off their prey’s flesh by thrashing around. Stanley knows the technique well – six-gills have spun his submarine 180 degrees while violently ripping off chunks of pork hanging from the vessel. He has seen them dozens of times, and they generally take anywhere from 30 minutes to five hours to appear, so we wait.

And wait.

Submarines are not roomy. With no bathroom on board, a dive is an exercise in bladder control. Tourists typically spend 3 1/2 hours in the sub, but Stanley has frequently spent entire nights at depth. The Idabel carries enough life support and air-cleaning carbon dioxide scrubbers to keep us alive for three days, but without an abyss-to-surface communication system, it’s improbable we’ll ever be found if we run into trouble.

For eight hours we are squashed together, a tangle of knees and elbows and hip bones, a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Finally, at 5am, Stanley says, “We can’t stay down here forever.” As we head for the surface, I ask him why our normally curious quarry was so elusive. He thinks it might be the two-day-old pig’s head.

“It’s so coagulated that it has stopped bleeding, but it isn’t old enough to really stink yet,” he says. He pauses, then offers a submission to the Understatement of the Year contest.

“I mean, this isn’t an exact science.”

At the age of nine, when most kids are just catching on to the lick-the-frozen-flagpole trick, Karl Stanley decided he wanted to build a submarine. The quest began in his New Jersey elementary school with a reading-comprehension exercise about a group of kids who built a submarine to find, fittingly enough, an underwater monster. “When I read about how much of the world is underwater and how little of it we’ve seen,” Stanley says, “I wanted to see what nobody else had.”

Stanley’s penchant for exploration is matched by his disdain for authority and both of these manifested at an early age. As a teenager, he snuck out of his home to raft the nearby Saddle River, leaving a Post-it note on the phone that read, “I left to go see the world – be back tonight.” At 14, feeling confined by his parents, he ran away to a family friend’s house; when he refused to return home, his parents hired private detectives to drag him to a reform school in Maine. He was expelled 13 days later after an unsuccessful escape and a shower strike. Then he was packed off to a mental hospital in New Jersey, where, after six weeks and another escape attempt, a panel of doctors proclaimed him fit to leave, although a few diagnosed him with what Stanley remembers as “defiance of authority” syndrome.

“Jacques Cousteau got kicked out of high school for breaking 17 windows,” Stanley says.

He went home to Ridgewood and focused his energies on building a submarine. The 15-year-old read everything he could and canvassed the submarine community for advice. Still, he managed to find trouble. After high school graduation, Stanley was arrested for attempting to detonate remote-triggered fireworks from the roof of a police station on July 4. At 18, he went to Florida’s Eckerd College to study marine biology but discovered only “boring classes with lots of math and no job prospects.” The self-taught engineer, it’s worth mentioning, is not fond of math. He studied history instead, a subject that appeals to his inquisitive side. “I don’t think you have to have an education in anything to be an explorer,” Stanley proclaims. “You just have to be curious enough to want to know. What did Christopher Columbus have a degree in?”

In his senior year, Stanley towed his partially built sub to Florida, and with money he’d earned from selling used college textbooks out of his dorm room, he completed the craft for $20,000. The week after his 1997 graduation, he took his Controlled by Buoyancy Underwater Glider (CBUG) on its first dive off the coast of St Petersburg to a depth of 3m. The next year, at a Florida diving trade show, he met a Roatán resort owner looking for a unique attraction. Stanley moved to Honduras and opened a submarine tourist operation where, for $185 a pop, he took customers in the CBUG to depths of 220m.

Tempted by the unknown, Stanley went back to the drawing board in 2002 to construct the Idabel, named after the Oklahoma town where he built it. (An Idabel-based tire manufacturer named Buck Hill had met Stanley while vacationing on Roatán and offered to help him.) It took two years to build. Stanley designed it to explore Roatán’s waters to a depth of 900m.

Roatán has a history of maverick seafarers. During the colonial era, the 53km-long, banana-shaped island of secluded bays and treacherous reefs offered the ideal pirate haven. Stanley calls Roatán’s location, which sits on a buckle of basalt above the 7,686m-deep Cayman Trench, “perfect. You can stand on the shore and throw a ball into water a kilometer deep.”

Like the buccaneers of yore, Stanley flouts the protocol that governs much of the nautical world. “His submarine would never pass certification, not even close,” says Robert Wicklund, managing partner of Florida-based Deep Sea Adventures, a company that specializes in submersible operations. In the United States, the American Bureau of Shipping typically certifies commercial sea craft (including submarines) that meet certain design and maintenance standards.

“Karl is very thrifty and makes things work on a small budget,” Wicklund says. “But he’s too much of a risk taker for most of us in the business. The thing is working, but I wouldn’t go down in it.”

Stanley says building the sub for certification would’ve doubled the cost of the $200,000 Idabel, an expense he couldn’t afford.

Until 2008, Stanley’s was working on Roatán illegally, charging tourists as much as $1,500 for a shark dive. He has collected rare seashells with his submarine, selling them for thousands of dollars apiece, and sunk a 33m ship at 425m to serve as a sharking base, all without permits. As his former Honduran lawyer, Ra?l Barrientos, puts it, “He has a lot of problems.”

He’s been quarreling with his Honduran neighbor, Rene Zeron, over the dock where Stanley keeps his submarine. Their relationship bottomed out in 2004, when Stanley, in a dispute over dock access, made injudicious use of a sledgehammer on Zeron’s gate. “He’s intractable,” says the 64-year-old local, who rents waterfront cabanas to tourists. Though Zeron has no desire to take the law into his own hands, he says that Stanley’s behavior would not sit well in the rest of Honduras, where violence is more common. “If he were on the mainland,” Zeron says, chopping his arm across his chest like an ax, “he’d be dead.”

Stanley claims that in 2007, when he inquired about extending his side of the dock, the municipality told him it wasn’t issuing any more permits. Weeks later, Zeron extended his dock, where the vice mayor, Delzie Rosales, now moors her fishing yacht.

A not-so-pleasant confrontation ensued between Stanley and Rosales. “Karl is running a business illegally,” says Rosales, who wants Stanley deported.

“If I was the mayor, it would be a different story.”

In May of last year, says Stanley, Rosales’ husband Marco threatened his life, and when he tried to report it to the police, Stanley was arrested and spent the night in jail.

In the face of this opposition, Stanley has legally formed a Honduran corporation, obtained residency, and registered his submarine. He is still waiting for an operating permit after numerous attempts to secure one, and vows to “stay here or die trying.”

Stanley is quick to point out that until the dock confrontation, the government condoned his presence – and still condones the presence of thousands of other working expats who support the island’s $14 million tourism industry. Yet Stanley flaunts a much higher profile than the average dive instructor and has been ordered not to work.

His response? Philanthropy. Instead of collecting fares, he has asked his clients to donate the money (to the tune of $20,000) to causes like Sol International Foundation, a local nonprofit organization that runs after-school programs. “He’s very interested in the island growing educationally,” says Sol president Dave Elmore. Stanley’s still annoying his neighbors, but doing it in the service of charity, and it’s difficult to tell which he finds more gratifying.

One morning, as we drive from the island’s dump after an unsuccessful search for dead things to use as shark bait, I ask Stanley if he considers himself a genius.

“I’m not a genius,” he replies, deftly steering his truck through a field of potholes. “I can’t even solve Rubik’s Cube. The two things I have in my favor are being stubborn and not doing things in a conventional way. Most people have the potential to do more but are afraid to break out of tried-and-true methods.”

That evening, we wait out a tropical storm in Stanley’s studio apartment, an Animal House bachelor pad with Captain Nemo-inspired decor, in hopes of going on a night dive. Stanley kills time by searching for the co-ordinates of a nearby 90m cargo ship he believes the US Navy scuttled at 800m. A fruitless rummage through a bookshelf stacked with titles like Barefoot Pirate and the Encyclopedia of Aquatic Life yields nothing but frustration. Outside, strong winds send waves slapping against the dock, where the Idabel hangs safely on a winch, and we hope the storm soon passes.

Stanley’s hesitant to dive in bad conditions, because he’s done it before. He once had to crowbar his sub off the rocks after rough surf washed it ashore with him and a passenger inside; he’s flipped it upside down (again in rough seas); gotten wedged into a cave; and even had it snagged on a rope at 70m, unable to surface (his worst nightmare). One close call in the Idabel came at 600m, when Stanley, along with Aaron Etches, a Roatán local, and Aaron’s pregnant wife Christine experienced a forgiving preview of “God’s Thunderclap,” in which an object that plummets below its maximum depth suffers roughly the same plight as a mosquito being squashed between clapping hands. Because of a design flaw (which Stanley says he’s fixed), the smaller of the sub’s two passenger windows cracked at a depth far shallower than the 914m to which Stanley had designed Idabel to go. They made it to the surface safely, but the experience still haunts Etches.

“I have nightmares about that sub,” admits the 33-year-old as we sit at his beachfront bar. Since then, says the rough-and-tumble local, he has gone back down in the sub “to conquer my fears.” Across the bay, the Idabel hovers in the air like a yellow bug, dry docked beneath a roof with Stanley’s credo painted in huge glow-in-the-dark block letters: GO DEEPER.

After hearing this story, I consider the logic of going down with Stanley. He’s never been to 730m, but after overhauling the Idabel, he’s ready to explore a new maximum depth. In conventional submarines, this type of testing is done in a compression chamber without passengers, but Stanley has made a career out of being a guinea pig. And after 1,080 dives, he’s still alive. He might be audacious, but he’s not suicidal. The Kool-Aid tastes better when we’re both drinking it.

A few days after the tropical storm, Stanley navigates the Idabel, carrying Mierzejewska (who’s back for another dive) and me, through the narrow channel to the buoy marking the location of End of the Line, the ship Stanley sank at 426m. Water rushes into the open ballast tanks, and we descend. The End of the Line is dark, empty and quiet, a graveyard at midnight, and after circling the rusty heap for a few minutes, we waltz off to a colony of coral at 343m feet. We buzz some gorgonian sea fans crawling with starfish and the strangest safari of my life procedes.

Verticality defines the seascape on the edge of the Cayman Trench. Five-story boulders teeter on cliff walls around us, evidence that the island is crumbling from below, shedding apartment-building-size chunks of limestone and basalt like a glacier calving icebergs. At 533m, Stanley abandons the wall, his primary navigational tool, and steers into emptiness. He’s heading for really deep water, where he can avoid what he calls the “ultimate sub booby trap” – a nest of 12 steel lobster traps tied together with floating lines, which sits at around 550m. If the Idabel snags on that, we may never see the surface again.

The submarine gets colder, and we pile on layers of clothing. At 631m, Stanley blows air into the ballast tanks to slow our descent. “No reason to barrel 100 miles per hour into oblivion,” he says. “We’ll go slowly.” We pass Stanley’s maximum test depth, 676m, a boundary acknowledged only with tense silence.

Stanley gets jumpy, his nervousness bordering on fear. “What was that noise?” he cries when I flick on my camera. Minutes later, when Mierzejewska rummages through her bag, he repeats the shrill inquiry. After two hours of slow descent, nearly a kilometer deep, it’s not the most comforting time to see the first chink in Stanley’s normally impenetrable armor of confidence.

Life at 740m below is a freak show. A siphonophore jellyfish floats by with hundreds of red tentacles glowing like a medley of fireworks. The sub’s nine lights illuminate a red-and-yellow-spotted anglerfish resting in the muck, startled that the lure dangling from its forehead would draw a creature as strange as the Idabel.

Every five minutes we see another tribute to nature’s sense of humor, and finally we bump into a flapjack devilfish, a fleshy orange Creamsicle of an octopus with Dumbo ears. It floats in the water column, arms and web extended like a gelatinous balloon, conserving energy in the food-starved environment by riding the bottom currents.

“I’ve spent plenty of time at 600m,” Stanley says as we rest on a ledge, “and I’m amazed at how much of a difference 120m makes in terms of the animal life. Half of the things we are seeing right now I’ve never seen before. Who knows what we’ll see in the next hour.”

Unfortunately, our trip is cut short after 31/2 hours when one of the Idabel’s motors breaks. The sub has five others, so the failure is more disappointing than dangerous. Stanley sends air into the ballast tanks. Our world transforms from dark to light, a sunrise time-lapse in real time, and we safely punch through the surface and into a spotless blue afternoon. The Idabel limps to shore, where Stanley promptly takes the broken motor apart and begins to solve yet another problem.