Little kids love dinosaurs. Ages ago, as a little kid
myself, I was like everyone else in that regard. I had a Styrofoam T-rex skeleton in my room, some toys and a
whole bunch of books on the subject.
One of these was a guide to ancient life published by Little
Golden books. Like some of my others, it went back to the beginning of the
planet, which meant that it had a little bit on the first four billion years of
earth’s history and really started in the Cambrian, where the first fossils
came from. I really liked this part. The animals from the Paleozoic were so
exotic and weird, especially the invertebrates, which were usually ignored
after the Devonian’s fish and amphibians, took the stage and stuff started to
look like dinosaurs
But I was fascinated by the invertebrates. I was a trilobite
freak. They dominated the seas until the middle of the Paleozoic, and then they
petered out, going extinct at the end of the era. But there were others, giant
sea scorpions, and echinoderms: starfish, sea urchins, and beautiful and weird
stalked things called sea lilies or crinoids. Ah crinoids! a minor childhood obsession that stuck in the
back of my mind for a lifetime. Crinoids still exist at the bottom of the seas
and I dearly wanted to see one in real life.
Sea Lilies dominated the seas of the Paleozoic, they are
some of the most common fossils and in the shallow seas of the time and, there
were billions of them, covering the ocean floor like sunflowers in Kansas. One
tiny group of them managed to survive into the Mesozoic and they flourished
again, but after the dinosaurs died out, they retreated into the deep abyss,
well out of range for snorkelers like yours truly.
Then, decades after I gave up hope, an opportunity presented
itself.
Roatán is the largest of Honduras’ Bay Islands. G Adventures
had a month long tour of Central America that was 20% off, and it being cold up
here in New York in December, I had decided to take it. Roatain was one of the stops and it was
primarily for the beach. One thing
I discovered when I got there was that there was this guy named Karl Stanley, who
had a submarine and gave tours of the continental shelf all the way down to the
bottom of the Caribbean Sea. The
eight year old in the back of my mind screamed out: “There’s CRINOIDS down
there and I wanna see ‘em!!!” So
the middle-aged rest of me decided investigate whether or not it was
practicable or not.
There are lots of dive shops in Half Moon Bay, and they all
knew about Stanley’s Roatán Institute for Deep-sea Exploration, but
unfortunately none of them could get me a reservation. He makes them himself
via his website or in person. It’s either PayPal or cash, and at $600 p.p. is
out of most people’s league and I didn’t know it was per person at double
occupancy. Still, it was worth a
try…
I went to Half Moon Bay’s lone Internet café and sent an
email. Then I went to actually find the office. This was a bit harder than I
expected, as it was on the second floor of a slightly rundown house surrounded
by near identical rundown houses.
I found him and introduced myself. He then explained that due to weight
distribution on his submarine, it was two passengers or nothing, but there was
this woman who wanted a ride. He’d contact here and if she was a go, I was a
go. That’s six hundred bucks, IN CASH. Something like Sixteen THOUSAND Honduran
Lampiras.
So I went on an expedition to find an ATM that had that much
money in it. This required a boat
trip to the next town and sneaking into a ritzy resort with guards.
I went back to Half Moon Bay with a huge bulge in my money
belt and prayed that I wouldn’t get robbed.
I stopped by the office again and asked Stanly if he wanted
my money. He said not yet, he hadn’t heard from the other person. So I went
back into town and waited…
So I had dinner and then went to a bar for a bit and went to
bed. The next morning, I got up, had some coffee and went to look at the
submarine. Stanley came down and told me he hadn’t heard from the other person.
I said he should call, in case the guy at the hotel had forgot to give her the
message.
It turned out he had: The start of a glorious day.
So we waited while my partner went to get six hundred bucks
in cash while we were waiting, Stanley and his crew prepped the boat while he
told me his story:
He was a big fan of nature shows as a kid, and in junior
high he decided to make a deep-sea submarine in his back yard. That’s sort of like building a Lear
Jet, it’s not rocket science, but…no, it IS rocket science. You have to find
the right materials, understand propulsion and pressure, and make most of the
parts yourself.
I guess he tried it out in a lake or something, he went to a
trade show and tried to sell it No buyers, which is understandable, who in his
right mind would buy the equivalent of a homemade spaceship from a frigging
teenager?
So Stanly went to college, getting a BA in American politics
or something. I was pretty amazed because I would have imagined he would have
majored in Oceanography. I think he took some courses however.
So he took his midlevel tech toy and went to Roatan. The
reason was twofold: The continental shelf was only a couple of hundred yards
from the beach, and Honduras didn’t have any regulations regarding submarines.
That was 1994.
Since then he’s built a better sub and has gone down
thousands of times. He complained that he undercharged National Geographic and
Animal planet when they went down with him to film abyssal sea life. He was telling me about the politics of
the island when my partner and her boyfriend showed up.
We shook hands; I gave Stanly my money and so did she. We
were weighed, signed a waiver (he doesn’t have insurance} and off we wen…no we
didn’t. She went into the sub and got a massive claustrophobia attack. She got out and demanded her money
back. White as a sheet she was. My
dream of crinoids was dying right then and there. I still wanted to go, but
without another person, it was impossible. I waited while he got out his cell phone and called another
person who was interested. He still was and was thrilled he had just gotten
someone else to go with him.
I was stuck. Stanly was out twelve hundred bucks and all the
work for the morning’s preparations. I felt sick, but then... then he came up
with an idea. He was friends with a retired nurse who ran a clinic on the
island for the impoverished residents and had promised to give one of the
volunteers a free trip. He made
the call. Someone was picked. I would only have to pay the per person fee.
Inner space, here I come!
Continental shelves are something that is rather hard to
imagine for us landlubbers. Most people who go to the beach generally find that
the ground beneath the sea gradually gets deeper and deeper until one cannot
stand up anymore. One doesn’t expect
a two-mile high cliff. As we went
along the surface of the Caribbean, it was like the glass bottom boats that
were available for trips at far less money. Bits of coral surrounded by plants
and small fish. It was
surprisingly drab. Then we hit the cliff face, went out into the open sea, and
started going down.
With our backs to the cliff face, things started getting
dark,that was about two hundred feet. Then five. It was totally black and our
guide decided to turn on the lights, but that wasn’t much of a help until we
passed a thousand then at around 1200 feet we hit bottom.
There was a rock. Stanly told us to look for a beer can on
our left. The rock was further away than I had thought, and it was huge. There
was a chimera, a kind of shark swimming close by. We didn’t see it for
long. However we did see sponges,
though, lots and lots of sponges.
As we realized we were actually at the bottom of the sea,
Jeremy got us off the bottom, turned our sub around, and began the slow ascent
to the surface.
Over the last two million years, the polar ice caps have
retreated and advanced many times, and with each advance the depth of the ocean
has varied by hundreds of feet, and with no pollution to harm it for most of
that time, the coral grew and grew. Coral only thrives near the surface, so the
reefs down near the bottom are all fossils, but everything else is still quite
alive and mostly sponges and crustaceans. We didn’t see all that many
crustaceans, but we did see some fish swimming along the cliff face. They
didn’t look as weird as I had hoped, but it was kind of strange to see them
swimming vertically instead of horizontally. Then we saw one.
There are two kinds of crinoids: stalked sea lilies and
free-swimming, stalkless feather stars.
Down where were we were, the stalked kind pretty much had the area all
to themselves. There one was in all it’s glory with its fronds hanging out,
catching detritus from further up.
I’d been waiting decades to see this. For a second I was a kid again, dreaming of the Paleozoic,
which was what was sitting right in front of me. Jeremy pointed out a
nondescript shell, which, he said was worth ten thousand dollars. It was a Monoplacophoran,
which was known only from fossils and down around here. Prior to 1952, it was
thought they had been extinct for 250 million years. I’d heard of these and wished they were more interesting
looking.
The thing about Jeremy’s submarine was that it had a huge
front window. The view of the cliff face was really easy to look out of. Life became more common as we ascended,
and I got to see more sea lilies and Coral-like Sea Fans. There was a feather
star sitting on a sea fan, which would have made a nice photograph, and all
sorts of weird sponges and tunicates, which are vertebrates who think they’re
sponges. Then at about four
hundred feet we saw a lionfish.
Lionfish are an invasive species that got into the Caribbean
area when either hurricane Andrew or Katrina freed some from an aquarium
breeding company in Florida or Louisiana. They are currently everywhere between
the Carolinas and Venezuela and are THE ecological problem of the region, which
is saying something.
All too soon it was over. Had that women not gotten
claustrophobia, we would have had an extra hour, but I had seen what I came to
see. It would be enough.
