by James Nestor
I come to, my head still in water, and I’m staring through my mask at the pool’s white concrete bottom. It feels like someone has filled my lungs with mustard gas. “Three forty-five. Almost there,” Mohammad says. I put my hands on the side of the pool to stop myself from sinking, from falling down into what feels like a deep, dark hole.
“Breathe!” says Pinon. I lift my head. “Breathe! Breathe!” says Pinon. The room spins. I try to exhale my lungful of air, but I’ve lost some muscle control and can’t. I push harder to force it out, to get a breath of fresh air in. A puff of air squeaks out, then my throat opens. I exhale completely and take a long inhale. With every intake of breath, my pinhole vision grows larger and larger, like the opening sequence of a James Bond movie. The room is blurry and covered in static for a moment, then everything comes into focus.
The instructor with gills tattooed on his ribs swims over and pats me on the back. “Good job, man,” he says. I’m the only one in our class who completed the four-minute breath-hold.
THE NEXT DAY OUR CLASS meets about a hundred miles inland from Tampa in a dirt parking lot outside the town of Ocala. Across the lot, in the shade of candleberry trees, is a dent in the ground that looks as if it’s been punched by a giant, angry fist. At the bottom of the hole is a pool of bright green water known as the 40 Fathom Grotto. As the name suggests, it plummets down more than 240 feet.
For the past forty years, emergency rescue workers have used the grotto for advanced scuba training. Before that, the locals used it as a public dump. It’s still filled with all manner of junk: rusty motorcycles, satellite dishes, a 1965 Corvette, a few Chevys, an Oldsmobile, innumerable bottles and cans. On one ledge, about forty feet down, is Gnome City, a collection of plaster gnomes and gnome castles placed there by divers; it’s set against a limestone wall covered in the fossilized remnants of fifty-million-year-old sand dollars. Even this water hole, fifty miles from the coast, was once part of the ocean.
At ten o’clock, Pinon swims two floats out to the middle of the grotto and connects them with a yellow rope. Our class pulls on wetsuits, masks, snorkels, and fins, and we slip in. In the hazy morning light, the water is a dull sapphire green with poor visibility, maybe twenty feet. The depths below that look black and brooding. We swim out to the floats and clutch the rope, dangling in single file like socks on a clothesline. We’ll be here for the next four hours attempting to freedive to sixty-six feet.
“Our first dive will be down to five meters,” Pinon says. “This is an easy dive, just to get warmed up.” Because the grotto is filled with fresh water, which is less dense than salt water, we’ll be about 2.5 percent less buoyant than we would be at sea. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but for freedivers, it’s a significant difference. We’ll sink faster and will have to exert a bit more energy during our ascents.
The human body in its natural form—with little or no clothing—has the ideal density for freediving; no weights are necessary to aid its descent. However, the thick wetsuits we’re all wearing throw off this balance, requiring each of us to wear about twelve pounds of weights in fresh water to compensate for the extra float.
The key to a successful deep dive is making oneself as hydrodynamic as possible. Loose clothing, extended limbs, or oversize masks can create drag, which will slow the descent and decrease depth and “down time”—freediver lingo for being underwater. When seals dive deep, they collapse their lungs, extend their spines, and often exhale air to reduce drag and gain depth faster and more easily. Freedivers do the same. “You put your arms to the side, head down, make yourself like a missile,” says Pinon.
Sinking is relatively easy, especially after the first ten or so feet; ascending is less so, which is why freediving can be so dangerous. As with mountaineering, you need to know your exact halfway point and have at least 60 percent of your energy and oxygen reserves left to make the return trip.
During the ascents, we’ll need to exhale all the air we’ve been holding at about seven feet below the surface. This allows us to immediately inhale much-needed fresh air at the surface without taking time to exhale, and it also helps protect against shallow-water blackouts. A few seconds could mean the difference between a successful dive and a samba or blackout. In freediving, success (in this case, remaining conscious) is measured not in feet or minutes but in inches and seconds.
As Pinon discusses the diving strategy, I notice a small group of scuba divers on a wooden float set up on the other side of the grotto. They are festooned head to toe with masks, tubes, tanks, vests, belts, and other equipment. They can barely walk on land and can only lumber gracelessly through the water. Their movements are extravagant because they can afford to be. From where I’m floating, it looks awkward and wasteful. But then again, those divers never have to worry about imploding their lungs or blacking out.
Ben dives first. We watch through our masks as he breathes up, submerges, and pulls himself down along the rope until he reaches a weighted plate around fifteen feet. He taps the plate, pulls himself back up, resurfaces, and goes to the end of the line. Lauren, Josh, and Mohammad, one after the other, go next. They all make the dive without much effort. I follow but resurface after hitting just ten feet or so, my head throbbing.
“That’s natural,” Pinon says. “It takes a little time. Try it again next dive.”
I ask Ben how he was able to descend and ascend so quickly. He mentions that he, Josh, and Lauren have been spearfishing for years. He assures me I’ll figure it out.
The problem for me, and for most beginners, is equalizing. The optimal rate of descent for a freediver is three feet per second, which requires equalization in sinus cavities (making the ears pop) about once a second, otherwise you’ll risk serious injury to the ear. Each pop must be complete; if it isn’t, Pinon instructed us to immediately stop, back up, and try it again.
Pinon lowers the plate to thirty feet, then forty-five. Others easily make these depths, but I can’t make it past fifteen feet.
At around two o’clock, it’s time for our last dive attempt. The plate is now sixty-six feet down—the lowest depth allowed for beginners. It’s invisible from the surface. All we can see going down is a yellow rope disappearing into dark green water.
It’s a frightening prospect to dive down into water not knowing where you’ll be when the rope ends or when you’ll take your next breath. Everything I know about surviving in the ocean tells me this is a bad idea. But I start breathing up anyway and prepare to dive.
Ben leads the group. He inhales one last time, then disappears. Forty-five seconds pass and we see no sign of him. Then, through the haze, he reemerges, pulling himself up the rope. He slowly resurfaces, breathes up, then goes to the back of the line. He made it down to sixty-six feet, seemingly without much effort. Lauren and Josh follow, all making the dive. Mohammad, a first-time freediver, makes it to about fifty feet, a commendable depth.
By the time it’s my turn, the pressure is on. I try not to look down at the disappearing rope as I inhale my last breaths. Big breath in, bigger breath out. Repeat.
Pinon pulls himself around the float so that he’s right beside me. “You need to make this dive. Say, ‘James is going to make this dive,’” he tells me. I nod, inhale, duck my head under the water, and climb down the rope.
With every pull of my right arm, I retract my right hand, pinch my nose, blow air into my ears, and try to equalize. It starts to work. I keep pulling, hand over hand, like Jack and the Beanstalk in reverse, until I feel the pressure of deeper water tightening around me. To make my body more hydrodynamic, I’ve placed my head down, so that I’m looking horizontally across the water, as if I were walking. Pinon, who is following me on the other side of the rope, stares through his mask. He is watching carefully to make sure I don’t exhale, start twitching, or black out.
I stare back and we hold each other’s gaze as we both sink. The water around us grows darker, then darker still. A strange sensation grabs at my shoulders. It feels like a larg
e hand is pulling at me. I loosen my grip on the rope and notice that I’m no longer drifting downwards. Every direction is washed in the same pale green fog—I’m trapped in an enormous marble. I wouldn’t know which way was up or down if I weren’t holding the rope.
Across the rope, Pinon is looking at me and shrugging. He puts his right hand in front of my mask and points down. He wants me to go deeper, I think. I shake my head no but he keeps pointing down. I notice that neither of us is holding the rope.
We’re just suspended here, two middle-aged men floating upside down, staring at each other, shaking our heads in the shadowy depths of a freshwater former dump in central Florida.
Then it occurs to me that maybe down is really up, and that maybe Pinon is signaling for me to get back to the surface. Maybe something is wrong. Is this what it feels like in the pink cloud?
I snap out of it, but now I really want to breathe. A cough right now could sap my body of the oxygen I need to make it back to the surface conscious. This thought fills me with fear. I feel an unyielding urge to return to the surface, to inhale fresh air. I quickly turn my body around on the rope like a baton and begin pulling back up. Pinon follows close behind. With each pull, the water grows slightly brighter and brighter until I can see, about fifteen feet above me, rows of dangling fins between two floats. They look similar to upside-down birds on a telephone wire. I exhale all my air at what feels like seven feet, then resurface.
I LEARN LATER THAT I made it about halfway down the rope, to about thirty feet. Not awful, but not great either. This wasn’t the doorway to the deep, but I was edging closer, starting to wipe my feet on the welcome mat. The tug of neutral buoyancy I felt just before I started back up the rope meant I was about ten feet away. For better or worse, the residual fear of being down there remained with me.
And days later, as I’m in the airport on my way home, I’m still shaking with excitement and looking around before I cough.
Someday, freediving may help me swim with sperm whales and, perhaps, plunge well past forty feet, but it could never take me down to the edge of the bathypelagic zone, a realm of pure and permanent blackness that extends from 3,300 down to 13,000 feet down. No sunlight has ever touched these deep waters. The pressure is debilitating, ranging from a hundred to four hundred times that of the surface, and water temperatures hover at a frigid 39 degrees. It’s hell, without the heat or crowds.
No diver of any kind—neither scuba nor freediver—has ever been down past 1,044 feet, which is just one-third of the way to the bathypelagic. Humans can access this world only by using deep-water machines. A remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), a car-size robot covered in lights and video cameras and attached by a cable to a boat, can plunge tens of thousands of feet deep, but it can carry no human cargo. There are about a half a dozen ROVs in the United States, operated by colleges and oceanographic institutions, that can reach the bathypelagic, but the experience of watching video stream from the deck of a boat strikes me as isolating. Nothing could match the experience of actually being down there.
Few submarines could make such a journey. Probably the most famous research submarine in the world is Alvin, a U.S. Navy vehicle first launched in 1964. During its past five decades of operation, Alvin has made more than 4,600 dives, many well into the bathypelagic. Hitching a ride on it was impossible. According to the media director at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which owns and operates the vessel, no journalist had ever ridden on the sub, and no nonscientist would be welcomed aboard. (I discovered later that the media director was either playing dumb or was misinformed. On rare occasions, Alvin has taken journalists aboard, sometimes on deep dives. But there was no point in arguing with her. It turned out that Alvin was in dry dock for the next two years getting upgraded.)
My only other option would be to board a private submarine. In the past decade, a cottage industry of specialized sub manufacturers had sprouted up in Florida and California, and for the first time, it had become possible for hobbyists to descend to about thirty-three hundred feet. These submarines, however, are prohibitively expensive, ranging from $1.8 to $80 million, and they can take years to build. Buying one obviously was out of the question. All attempts I made to contact these subs’ super-wealthy owners proved fruitless. I never even got a response.
Then a friend told me about a New Jersey man named Karl Stanley who began building a submarine out of plumbing parts in his parents’ backyard when he was fifteen. When he was fourteen, Stanley spent six weeks in a mental hospital—diagnosed with “defiance-of-authority syndrome.” When he got out, he successfully proceeded building his DIY sub, with no engineering background. Eight years later, in 1997, he had designed and hand-built a vessel with the lightest displacement hull (the part of a marine vessel that controls buoyancy) in history, and he’d done it for a total of $20,000—about a hundredth of what it would have cost on a project run by engineers. The sub, which he called a controlled-by-buoyancy underwater glider (CBUG), could carry two people down to 725 feet.
Because taking tourists down seventy stories in a homemade, unlicensed submarine, without insurance, was a liability nightmare, Stanley moved his operation to Roatan, Honduras, where regulations for underwater craft were lax or nonexistent. Stanley’s submarine tours were a hit. A few years later, he designed and built a bigger vessel, named Idabel, that could carry three passengers down to about three thousand feet.
The bathypelagic, or midnight zone, is defined as any depth in water where no sunlight can penetrate. In the Caribbean Sea off Roatan, that depth is about seventeen hundred feet, well within Idabel’s range. I wanted to go as deep as Idabel could take me, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to go that deep again. Although 2,500 feet was still a few hundred feet short of what oceanographers consider the official bathypelagic zone, it was as close as any private citizen of ordinary means could get.
Better yet, Stanley had no disclaimers, no liability waivers for me to sign, no insurance requirements. If something bad happened, all passengers, including Stanley (who piloted every dive), would die. End of story. No submarine left and nobody to sue. All I had to do was wire him $1,600 and pick a date.
The trip down and back, he said, would take about four hours. For the duration of the dive, I’d be curled up in a steel ball the size of a car trunk, and I would have to stay there without stretching, peeing, or losing my mind for the entire expedition.
Stanley has had his share of close calls. He’s gotten Idabel stuck in a cave and snagged on a rope below 200 feet. Once, the hull partially collapsed at 1,960 feet while he was carrying a local from Roatan and his pregnant wife inside. Two windows cracked, but fortunately they didn’t shatter. On other expeditions, gaskets have popped out; occasionally a motor seized or just quit. But Stanley has made design fixes every time, and after nearly a thousand dives, nobody has died; nobody has even gotten hurt.
In his homemade, hand-built, self-designed submarine, Stanley has spent more time in the deep waters between one and two thousand feet than anyone in history.
THE ROATAN INSTITUTE OF DEEPSEA Exploration, the official name of Stanley’s submarine-tour business, sits at the outer edge of the island’s touristy West End, a crescent bay of white sand and placid blue water facing the Caribbean. The West End is a popular getaway for backpackers, American families on a budget, and day-tripping cruise-ship guests, and it looks the part. There are sand-floored tiki bars serving pink slushy drinks, sunburned men with balloon stomachs and stick legs, and women with bottle-blond hair wearing pink bikinis. Stray dogs on trash heaps scratch hairless backsides. Locals smoke knockoff Marlboros outside a restaurant called Cannibal Café. The sound of Bob Marley’s Legend blasts from duct-taped boom boxes and mingles with Nokia ringtones that chirp from the pants pockets of bare-chested taxi drivers.
About a half a mile from all the noise, and down an unmarked road canopied by dead palm fronds, is Stanley’s house, an old colonial-style clapboard a few dozen feet from the water. A
wooden walkway reaches out to a small dock. Painted across the dock’s awning are the words Go Deeper. In the shade beneath, dangling from a steel cable, is a sub straight out of Beatles’ lore: it’s bright yellow, with round windows on all sides and a circular stovepipe bump in the back. The name IDABEL runs across one side in blue, sans-serif capital letters.
Stanley stands behind Idabel holding a chunk of steel machinery he’s just pulled from the hull. Tall and slender, he wears reflective glasses, a gray muscle T-shirt, and khaki shorts. A generator coughs exhaust in the background, and gusts of compressed air fart from beneath the sub every few seconds. I’m early, and I’ve caught Stanley making a few last-minute fixes. He looks annoyed as I approach to shake his hand, holds eye contact for a little too long, then walks back to the sub without a word.
Idabel is double-occupancy, meaning that I had to purchase two passenger seats ($800 each). I asked Stan Kuczaj, the dolphin scientist I had met a few months earlier in Réunion, if he’d like to come along. Kuczaj was staying in Roatan for the week to conduct research on captive dolphins at a resort a few miles away. Even though he’d been studying the ocean and its inhabitants for more than thirty-five years, he’d never been in a submarine, and never seen the ocean past around 120 feet down while scuba diving. He was ecstatic to join me.
But after Kuczaj viewed Idabel’s cramped conditions, his chattery excitement turned to a sort of silent dread. The sub is thirteen feet long and about six feet wide. Its top portion has nine glass portholes, allowing for a 360-degree view. Stanley stands in that spot and looks out the ports when he pilots the sub. Passengers ride up front, at his feet, in an area he calls the passenger sphere. This section is a scant fifty-four inches in diameter with about three feet of sitting room, or about the width of a La-Z-Boy recliner. In our case, this chair will have to seat two six-foot-two men. In front of this seat is a thirty-inch-wide convex Plexiglas window.