Below, Idabel Submarine how it looks like now—2015.
Stanley, who designed the sub and moved to
McCurtain County last spring to build it, is featured in the November 2002 issue of
National Geographic Adventure.
The article focuses on the adventurous
life and restless spirit of the 28-year-old entrepreneur.
As of 2015 he's actually 41 years old.
It traces his
adventures from sub-urban Ridgewood, N.J., where he started building his first
homemade sub in his parents’ yard, to college in Florida; to using the sub to
do sub-contract dives for a Canadian company searching for wrecks outside the
harbor in Havana, Cuba; to tourist dives off Roatan Island, Honduras; and
finally to Idabel.
Stanley, who is proud enough of the
article that he’s showed advanced copies to friends and work associates, and
ordered a subscription to the magazine for the Idabel Public Library, told
freelancer Paul Bennett (who he recently visited in Italy) his best estimate is
that his sub will be operating in Roatan by May.
Now operating in Half-Moon Bay.—2015.
The article also noted he has mailed his
plans for an underwater hotel to the tourism minister for Roatan (an island in
Honduras).
Bennett, whose article is entitled The
Pipe Dreamer, described a Stanley’s vision that “honeymooners would be shuttled
out in a dinghy just before sunset, sealed in and dropped”.
He also talks about the honeymoon suite
where “couples can look out at 1,000 feet and watch a shark take bait off a
hook.”
The Idabel is composed of three thick
steel spheres to be connected into a solid unit (described as “kind of like a
snowman… three different sized spheres stacked in an L”).
(As described in an earlier article in
the McCurtain Gazette, its biggest sphere is the spot where riders will sit and
view deep sea life: the two smaller spheres are where Stanley will pilot the
sub and man the controls).
The making of his first submarine, named
the C-Bug —at just 2,400 pounds “the lightest sub ever made” says Stanley — is
also described.
He started that project at age 11,
tracking down an amateur bubmariner and picking his brain, then talking his
parents into buying him some welding equipment. He got a lot of help from his
research, including diagrams in R. Frank usby’s Manned Submersibles.
The sub project was shelved while he
studied history at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla. But Stanley became a
sort of campus celebrity when he finished the sub there just in time for
graduation.
It’s a two-seater with room enough for himself and one other person.
One of the main ideas Stanley borrowed from the
world of DIY submarining was from a book that described Navy efforts to develop
an engineless gliding submarine.
“I knew it had to be cylindrical, and it
had to be strong,” he told Bennett of this idea’s development.
When he launched
the C-Bug at a creek near the Eckerd campus, about 100 people, including a St.
Petersburg newspaper and TV people were on hand. Also, “20 safety divers stood
at the ready,”—the article notes. The sub hit bottom at 90 feet in the Gulf of
Tampa Bay, then the venue became deeper —670 feet off the continental shelf in
the Atlantic Ocean—.
The Ft. Lauderdale Sentinel did a
feature article on the entrepreneur-designer-dreamer just before he met someone
from Honduras and settled in at the Half-Moon Bay on the West End, Roatan.
Here, at $185 per dive for tourists, the
C-Bug hit depths of 700 plus feet where the island drops off into one of the
world’s deepest ocean trenches (the Cayman Trench).
Actually pricing per individual based on double occupancy and for similar tour done by the C-Bug is aprox. US$500 (1,000 feet/305 m)—2015. Click on each of the images below to check actual rates per dive. Also, you can book directly your at Stanley's Submarine Website
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1000 ft/1.5 hour dive
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2000 ft/3.5 hour dive
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Lophelia Reef dive 4 hr
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Six-Gill Shark Dive 5-9 hr
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The article also describes the "dangers".
One customer who is quoted —by the National Geographic Adventures article—tells of a porthole starting to crack at 650 feet
and the “longest five minutes of my life” getting back to the surface.
The author also got an engineer who has
tested subs in tanks for the Navy to run some strength and durability numbers
on Stanley’s submarine based on the size and thickness of steel walls.
The
engineer is quoted as saying "it would collapse below a maximum depth of 440
feet" (it actually went to 700).
Stanley says he is building his new sub
bigger and stronger than the first one.
The steel is thicker (the Idabel will
be three times as heavy at 7,500 pounds) and his helpers at Gary’s (Darren
Milner Tinker Beck and Shannon Crain) are taking cach weld seriously.
Stanley, who shows up at 7 a.m. every
weekday at the machine shop in cast Valliant, says his hopes are that the three
spheres will be attached within one month, or before he goes home to visit his
parents at Thanksgiving.
“We’re on the home stretch.— He says of
the estimated one-year project. We’ve got to cut a groove on the pilot tower where the hatch will seal.—
Also, putting in the 30-inch window on
the 54 inch-diameter passenger sphere will entail some more cutting and
close-seal work.
Before that, there’s the job of putting
the steel parts in a giant oven where heat up to 1,100 degrees will “streess-relieve”
any stresses in the steel caused by heating and cooling.
After the final assembly, there’s the
shipping of the Idabel to Roatan and the business of taking it deeper than
ever.
One of the reasons for Stanley wanting to go deeper than Scuba divers go
(200 feet) and than his first sub went (700 feet) is a wreck of a 300-foot
cargo ship at 2,000 feet and the slit shell.
The National Geographic Adventure article’s author points out
collecting shells became Stanley’s side business at Roatan, and notes that a perfectly shaped slit shell can bring
up to $2,000 to the finder.
“They are the oldest living species of mollusks on
the planet,” Stanley says. “They only live in deep water over 400 feet, and
only in rocky areas that are hard to dredge. That’s why they’re so rare.”
Stanley has made friends locally, but he
doesn’t shy away from voicing sometimes controversial views —including one
recently about the suffering of bulls at rodeo bull-riding events.
He has also
taken up for a friend whose flea-marketing business came under criticism at a
city council meeting. And he may not be looked upon in
friendly terms by the Ridgewood, N.J., police department.
The National Geographic Adventure article
notes that just before his 18th birthday, he broke into the police
station there to destroy parking tickets because of his outrage about a parking
restriction aimed at teen-agers.
Although he never spent any time in
jail, Stanley did end up with a police record. This could affect his
citizenship rights in some states, but hasn’t in Oklahoma, he says (a resident
of Idabel since last spring, he has registered to vote).
Gary and Darren Milner along with Beck
and Crain have read the article. They like it, and are especially impressed by
a cover picture shot at the shop, but they are disappointed it never mentioned
the name of the business.
Also, the Half-Moon Bay wasn’t mentioned
(the three owners of the resort are reportedly excited about the tourist sub’s
returns).
It doesn’t detail why Stanley chose Idabel for his work (he met
Idabel industrialist Buck Hill at Half-Moon Bay and had lunch with him,
learning about the machining skilled environment of McCurtain County)..
However, overall, the article is an
engaging reflection of Stanley’s boldness, inventiveness, self-confidence and
determination, qualities that proved rather valuable to American icons like
Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford.
