How to Survive a Homemade Submarine, Part 2 😕

This is a true story...

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
--Jacques Cousteau

Read part 1 here

I start becoming convinced that this is a bad idea right as the Pink Floyd track “Comfortably Numb” is abruptly cut off halfway through a David Gilmore guitar solo. I spin around to see Karl’s sandals shifting as he shimmies down in his cylindrical cockpit. His boyish face pops into view at the end of the narrow segment that connects the passengers' bubble to the captain’s tower. His white t-shirt is barely visible in the dim light, but I can make out most of the message emblazoned on its front: TRUST ME. I DO THIS ALL THE TIME.

“I’m getting sick of waiting,” he states with his typical staccato delivery. “So I’ve hyper-oxygenated the air.”

“What does that mean?” I ask drowsily.

“If my math is right, we can survive thirty-five minutes with the submarine turned off.”

“...and you’re concerned about that because…?” I inquire hesitantly. My companion has roused herself from beneath the blanket pile. “Vat is happen?” she mumbles.

“I think the shark can feel the submarine’s electrical signals.” Karl says matter-of-factly. “So I’m going to turn everything off and see if she’ll come in for a bite.”

Karl checks his wristwatch. “We should be good for half an hour.”

“And vill ze sub turn back on after?”

Karl shrugs with a half-cocked smirk before disappearing back into his cockpit. Over the muffled din of thrown switches and spun dials, I hear his faint reply: “Probably.”

Then he kills the lights.

I am looking at a color so dark that the history of human language has yet to create a word to adequately describe it -- but if it were a Crayola crayon, I would christen it Eternal Night.

Even our monkey-brained ancestors had the gentle banner of the Milky Way to illuminate the void, and even their darkest of nights contained the faintest glimmer of the coming day. But not down here. Sunlight has not kissed this r'lyehian realm in billions of years. Our human eyes are too primitive to pierce this impenetrable pitch-black which enshrouds almost seventy percent of our planet. I wave my hands against the inky emptiness before my eyes. I can only perceive an ethereal green outline as my propriosensory system makes futile attempts to mentally draw in the missing data.

There is nothing we can do now but wait.

What the hell have I done?

The spasm of panic surges through me as I recognize the insanity of my immediate situation. Like Marty McFly, I have leapt into some homemade contraption with an eccentric gringo genius and been whisked off to a place that should not be.

After all, Karl’s professional submarine-building qualifications consist entirely of:

1. a Bachelor’s in American Studies from a tiny liberal arts college in Florida,
2. a Master’s in Badassery from the School of Hard Knocks, and
3. a PhD in Human Ingenuity from the University of Why The Hell Not

Karl’s greatest credential, at least according to him, is that he’s done this over a thousand times and is still alive. It all started as a teenager, when, fresh out of a stint at a juvenile corrections facility, his parents asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He told them he wanted to build a submarine, so they bought him a set of welding gear and told him to figure it out (future parents, take note!).

So he did. At an age when most of us are still figuring out how to talk to girls without getting an erection, Karl built himself a veritable underwater glider named the C-BUG.

Laying on his back in this coffin-shaped submarine, Karl controlled the ballast by shifting sandbags back and forth. Scuba cylinders strapped to the outside of the submarine served a steady supply of air, while a carbon dioxide scrubber recycled his exhalations. A single cylindrical hatch allowed him to sit up and look around out of an array of portholes. After a few test runs in a lake near his college, he began exploration of the deep walls off the Florida coast. Karl eventually navigated as deep as 700 feet underwater in his terrifyingly tiny submarine.

At one point, the US Coast Guard busted him for operating a ship without a license. When they went to classify his vessel, they had to classify it as a personal canoe because it lacked an engine or propellers!

We are currently sitting in his second submarine, Idabel. Yes, the man has two submarines. It makes for one helluva pickup line at the beach bar.

Idabel is named in honor of the small Oklahoma town that hosted Karl’s mad science project for two years. Living out of his car in an uninsulated warehouse and starting with just a trio of clay spheres smashed together in an L-shape as his “model,”, he steadily welded together his next vision: a three-chambered, quad-propeller, twin ballast masterpiece of self-taught engineering genius capable of venturing 3000 feet underwater.

The sub’s two passengers sit in the largest forward sphere in the L behind a large convex porthole, which enables a wide angle of vision at the expense of warped depth perception. A second flat circular porthole cut into the floor provides an undistorted view of the seafloor. Between our feet rest stacks of soggy sandbags, moist towels, and a Gatorade bottle half-filled with urine.

Captain Karl stands in the other two spheres, surrounded by an octagonal array of flat portholes giving him effectively 360 degrees of vision. The propellers are mostly used for horizontal navigation; Karl still uses his old sandbags as trim weights to sink or float the submarine. Strobes protrude from the submarine like a pair of insect antennas, each bearing a superluminous bulb capable of piercing several hundred feet ahead through the clear Caribbean waters. Twin ballasts, currently resting on the silty moonscape of the abyssal plain, are strapped with a half dozen scuba tanks which act as both our life support and horizontal stabilization.

We are well beyond any hope of contact with the surface. Cell phone and radio waves are completely absorbed within the first few feet of the surface -- phoning home is simply impossible. Sonar could theoretically work -- bounce a sonar signal to a surface-side buoy which then transmits a radio-based emergency signal -- but then what would be the point? It’s not like the Honduran Navy has any submarines on standby -- or at all.

Simply put, there are no vessels within thousands of miles capable of rescuing us. Karl knows this. That’s why there was no liability waiver required to board: if catastrophe strikes, how can you sue the captain when he’s an imploded mess of metal and meat?

Not exactly comforting thoughts, especially when we're trapped in the pitch black 1500 feet underwater inside a powered-off, homemade submarine...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Read part 1 here

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Photographs courtesy of Lia Barrett, Karl Stanley, Ethan Gordon and @thescubageek

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