| A Sinking Feeling |
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Page 1 of 2 When travel calamity strikes, why must it be at 20,000 leagues under the sea?  I’ve been chewed up and spit out by a number of woman in my life, but in terms of sheer nastiness, what Idabel did to me off the coast of Roatán on August 20, 2006, was flat unconscionable. It’s not that I was unaware of the threat she posed. What’s a relationship without a whiff of danger? I knew Idabel could take me places I’d never been, that we could plumb seemingly boundless depths together. But I never could have predicted the pain.To be clear, Idabel is a submarine—a yellow submarine, actually, the size of a VW Bug. She was built by the deep-sea explorer Karl Stanley, an American-born resident of Roatán, one of Honduras’s Bay Islands. The island sits on the edge of the Cayman Trench, which means any time Stanley wants to take Idabel out for a spin, he only has to putter a few hundred feet from his dock before the seafloor plunges more than 7,000 feet. As it happened, I was in Roatán for some underwater exploration myself, albeit with a mask and tank. But scuba can take you only so deep. Stanley was ferrying tourists to 2,000 feet—20 times deeper than the recreational scuba limit. His Web site promised a magical world seldom seen by human eyes, a world of bioluminescent sea goblins, of strange corals that require no sunlight, of fish that stand on their heads. I called him to schedule a ride. “Can you come now?” he asked. “Now?” I’d just finished a day of diving and was unwinding over a dinner of roast chicken and rice. “My sister’s in from the States,” he said. “We’re taking a night dive.” I told him I’d hurry over. Stanley was a boyish-looking 32, with an efficient, no-nonsense demeanor. He introduced me to Idabel. She had two compartments, a spherical area up front that was four and a half feet in diameter and could claustrophobically fit two people on a bench seat, and a control room where Stanley could stand and pilot the sub. His sister, Jessica, and I crawled through the top hatch, shimmied through the control room, squeezed into the front compartment, and cozied up on the bench. Under any other circumstances she could have had me arrested. Our plan was to visit a small supply ship that Stanley had recently acquired from the Navy and sunk at 1,600 feet in hopes of creating an artificial reef to attract sea life. After motoring along the surface for 30 minutes, we began descending. Outside, the water faded from blue to indigo to navy, and at 300 feet we were in complete blackness. At 800 feet Stanley killed the floodlight and cranked up Pink Floyd, and suddenly hundreds of bioluminescent hatchetfish were whizzing past us, followed by ink-shooting squids. “Whoooooa,” Jessica said. “Duuuuuude,” I concurred. This was about the time my lower intestine initiated an urgent conversation with me. It’s the same dialogue my intestine and I often engage in when I travel in developing countries, which is why I’m never without the wonder drug Cipro. Typically, what happens is this: I buy a tantalizing food item from a street vendor, a mistake that triggers bacterial mayhem and forces me into the nearest bathroom for a nuclear event, after which I pop the antibiotic and—shazam!—I’m cured. But I was now 900 feet below the ocean’s surface and sinking fast, in a room not much larger than a washing machine, pressed up against a beautiful woman. This was no place for a nuclear event. Eleven hundred feet, 1,200 feet… I pinched up my face. I ground my teeth. I performed seemingly impossible feats with my glutes. I tried to think pleasant thoughts. But something Stanley said earlier now dominated my consciousness: “We could be down there five hours.” At 1,600 feet Stanley parked on a sandy ledge. The scenery amazed Jessica, and she looked over to share the moment. But she found me with my eyes in the back of my head. “Are you OK?” she asked. I groaned. “Karl!” Jessica hollered. “Paul’s not feeling well. We have to go up.” “Are you kidding me?” Karl said, with all the compassion of a bivalve. “We just got here. I haven’t even shown Paul the ship.” “Show me the ship, Karl,” I croaked. “Show me the ship.” |
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