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Dangerous Encounters: Jurassic Shark

Dangerous Encounters: Jurassic Shark

Plunging to extreme ocean depths, braving frigid waters, and dodging razor sharp teeth, Brady Barr is on a quest to get close up to one of the worlds most mysterious, deep-sea sharks- the giant sixgill shark. Brady goes 1700 feet down to find a giant shark, but these descendents of Jurassic-era sharks don’t seem to appreciate his effort.

Learn more at:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/dangerous-encounters/3904/Overview#tab-Overview

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Capt. Stanley’s unlicsensed, DIY shark dives

Capt. Stanley’s unlicsensed, DIY shark dives

Karl Stanley is a very happy man: he just found a dead horse.

The entrepreneur made the discovery while cruising in his submarine, the Idabel, 1,700 feet beneath the waters off Roatan, Honduras. At that depth, amid jagged black boulders and hills of sediment, you can see some amazing creatures: lobsters with spindly arms as long as their bodies, silver-skinned fish the size of a cavalry saber, orange anglerfish with jaws locked in a perpetual grin.

But to see the really big beasts, you need some really big bait. So eight hours earlier, Stanley had bought a tired old horse from a nearby stable, led it onto a boat, shot it in the head, tied cinder blocks to its hooves, and dumped it in the ocean.

The sea this morning was rough, and an unexpected lurch tossed the carcass overboard before Stanley had reached his intended spot. In these murky depths, finding lost objects – even one as large as a horse – can be tough. But there it is, the body stiff but intact, and a foot-long, clawless crustacean called an isopod crawling up its flank.

Read more at:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/13/smallbusiness/subprime_sub.fsb/index.htm

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Off the Deep End

Off the Deep End

By Thayer Walker – June 2008 – Outside Magazine

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 a few hundred feet off the Honduran island of Roatán. Disconcerting because it’s 8:30 p.m. and we’re about to spend the night 1,600 feet down searching for the six-gill shark, an enigmatic 15-foot, 1,300-pound predator that patrols these depths.

“That’s just the O-ring,” Stanley reassures me as water wells up in the window and drips to the floor. Apparently the rubber washer meant to seal the window separating us from watery doom is feeling a touch rebellious. “It doesn’t have enough compression on it. Hopefully it will fix itself under pressure.” Stanley is a problem solver, and he casually throws me a towel to wipe up the moisture, more concerned about the corrosive properties of saltwater than the possibility of a catastrophic breach.

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 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 Ph.D.’s and multi-billion-dollar budget, to blow up. Stanley turns a handle, filling the ballast tanks with water, and we begin to sink into unexplored darkness.

Read more at:
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/Off-The-Deep-End.html

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A Sinking Feeling

A Sinking Feeling

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 Roatan, 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 Roatan 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.

Read more at:
http://outsidego.com/index.php/20080404287/First-Person/A-Sinking-Feeling/menu-id-1.html

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Submarinaro Amarillo

Submarinaro Amarillo

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Trust me…

Trust me…

It was just past midnight and I was starting to fade. So were my companions Karl Stanley and his girlfriend Jan Olson. We were sitting on the bottom of the ocean in Karl’s submersible, Idabel. Sixteen hundred feet of saltwater separated us from the surface. Jan and I dozed in the forward passenger compartment while Karl worked quietly just behind us in the cockpit. Mechanical noises came and went: the air scrubber, the oxygen regulator, a toggle switch were and there. It all helped lull me to sleep. If it weren’t for the cold condensation that occasionally dripped on my head, it was have been the perfect place for a good night’s rest. However, I wasn’t supposed to be resting. It was my watch.

Try as I might, my eyelids were heavy and I blinked for undetermined amounts of time. But, somewhere between dreamland and reality, if a difference exists and this depth, I spotted an apparition the sub. “Shark,” I began to yell, but stifled it. A giant for glided past our window and back into the darkness. Silently the specter of the deep had passed.

Download the article at:
https://www.stanleysubmarines.com/files/fathoms.pdf [10.6MB PDF]

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Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine

We hit 800 feet and keep descending, which is about the time Karl Stanley turns off the lights, turns on the Pink Floyd and revolutionizes my impression of the underwater world forever. We’re plunging headlong into the 12,000-foot Cayman Trench off Roatan in Stanley’s three-person yellow submarine, Idabel, and bioluminescent life forms are swooshing past the viewing portal, thousands of them, a cascading array of fiery objects. It’s like riding Halley’s Comet through outer space. “Wooooooow,” is all I can think to say. “Once you get deep enough, 90 percent of everything is bioluminescent,” says Stanley, who’s been deeper than 2,000 feet in this thing.

“Wooooooow,” I repeat, psychedelically.

The adrenaline rush actually started early this morning, before I’d even stepped inside Stanley’s magic sub. I’d signed on for a series of activities that included a 110-foot wreck dive, two fabulous wall dives and, during my surface interval, a zip-line canopy tour through the jungle 70 feet off the ground. Now it’s nighttime, and I’m 1,650 feet beneath the ocean surface, with Stanley using a green laser to point out chimera sharks, isopods, fish-eating tunicates and other freaky creatures that never break 1,000 feet.

“Woooooow.”

Read more at:
http://www.scubadiving.com/travel/caribbean-atlantic/bay-islands-ultimate-adventure-guide?page=,0

Download the article:
https://www.stanleysubmarines.com/files/scuba_diving.pdf [5.3MB PDF]

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Do-it-yourself ahoogah

Do-it-yourself ahoogah

Hundreds of feet beneath the Caribbean’s aquamarine surface, self-appointed submarine captain Karl Stanley counts the particles in a beam of light.

If he looks up, he’ll see the dark silhouettes of hammerheads circling. If he follows the spotlight to its end, he’ll see psychedelic tube sponges gripping the sea wall. Instead, the 29-year-old focuses on particles because they help quantify the lifelong fascination with submarines that landed him on this island off the coast of Honduras.

Down there, the water is so clear that his particle count is close to zero. Down there, a man in a submarine feels as if he can see forever.

Not that many are willing to risk the view. This planet’s 330 million cubic miles of water remain almost entirely unexplored. And that drives people like Stanley batty — some so batty that they go into the garage, pull out the wrenches and hacksaws and take matters into their own hands.

Read more at:
http://www.latimes.com/features/la-os-sub6apr06,0,3194095,full.story

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Confessions of a Backyard Submarine Builder

Confessions of a Backyard Submarine Builder

By Mary Anne Potts – November 2002 – National Geographic Adventure

At 15, Karl Stanley began building a sub from a length of steel pipe. Here’s the crazy part: It worked. Today, at 28, he’s building his second sub and dreaming of underwater Jacuzzis, as he explains in this interview.

Karl Stanley’s first submarine, C-BUG (Controlled by Buoyancy Underwater Glider), is easily one of the most innovative personal submarines ever made. The lightweight craft operates primarily without the help of any motor, and even more impressive, it began as a ten-foot-long [three-meter-long] steel pipe, which Stanley began welding in his parents backyard 13 years ago. At the time, Stanley was a high school sophomore with no formal welding experience, let alone an engineering degree.

A year after C-BUG’s completion in 1997, Stanley found a home for his yellow submarine just outside U.S. waters. At the Inn of Last Resort in Roatán, Honduras, Stanley and C-BUG take paying passengers to greater and greater depths—up to 725 feet [221 meters]—and into rarely seen realms of the Caribbean.

Now, after four years, Stanley, 28, is looking to go deeper. Between his time in Roatán and visiting friends around the world, Stanley has a semipermanent residence in Idabel, Oklahoma. There he is building his second sub, fondly named after its birthplace. He estimates that Idabel will be complete by May 2003.

Read more at:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0211/q_n_a.html

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The Pipe Dreamer

The Pipe Dreamer

At age 15, it had never occurred to Karl Stanley that he wouldn’t be able to do whatever he set his mind to. So why should welding together his own submarine—and taking it to depths that frighten formally trained engineers—be any different?

Download the article at:
https://www.stanleysubmarines.com/files/natgeo_adventure.pdf [6.2MB PDF]

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Sub builder featured in magazine

Sub builder featured in magazine

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Depth Perception

Depth Perception