I can’t swim and I’m afraid of the ocean, and I was about to dive to two thousand feet in a home-built amateur submersible in the hope of spotting a giant sixgill shark feed from a slurry of fish and goat viscera that the amateur-submersible builder and captain, Karl Stanley, had dropped into the sea for my benefit the night before. It was early February on the coast of the Caribbean island of Roatán, in the Bay Islands archipelago of Honduras. Below us, in the water, was the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef. The sea was shamelessly turquoise, the clouds feathery; the palm fronds clacked like castanets. Karl’s neighbor, whose rumored profession it would not be wise to put into print, was blasting “Because I Got High” by Afroman on repeat.
