ONE MORNING, as we drive away from the island's dump after an unsuccessful search for dead things to bait the submarine with, I ask Stanley if he considers himself a genius.

"I'm not a genius," he replies, deftly steering his truck through a field of potholes. "I can't even solve the Rubik's Cube. The two things I have in my favor are being stubborn and not doing things in a conventional way. Most people have the potential to do more but are afraid to break out of the tried-and-true method."

The evening after our dump forage, we wait out Tropical Storm Olga in Stanley's studio apartment, an Animal House bachelor pad with Captain Nemo–inspired decor, in hopes of going on a night dive. Stanley kills time by searching for the coordinates of a nearby 300-foot cargo ship he believes the U.S. Navy scuttled at 2,600 feet. A fruitless rummage through a bookshelf stacked with titles like Barefoot Pirate and Encyclopedia of Aquatic Life yields nothing but frustration, so he turns to a tried-and-true childhood method—he calls his parents.

"It's a Navy ship log in a plastic folder," Stanley tells his mother, Viola, over Skype. "I think it's under my bed." Another call comes in. "Mom, I have to go. It's my lawyer."

Stanley invites Barrientos over with the brevity of a client on the clock and then checks out the weather on the Internet. There will be no diving this night. Stanley throws on a Jacques Cousteau DVD as Barrientos arrives. They walk outside and quietly confer. Stanley's papers won't come quickly. He's formed a Honduran corporation and applied for a business license, a process that at best will take months to complete. Until then, he can't work. He returns distraught and sighs, "I gotta pay my lawyer." Outside, strong winds send waves slapping against the dock, where Idabel hangs safely on a winch, and we hope the storm soon passes.

Stanley's hesitant to dive in bad conditions, because he's done it before. He once had to crowbar CBUG off the rocks after rough surf washed it ashore with him and a passenger inside; he's flipped it upside down (again in rough seas); gotten wedged into a cave (the guy likes to explore); and even had it snagged on a rope at 230 feet, unable to surface (his worst nightmare). One close call in Idabel came at 1,960 feet, when Stanley, along with Aaron Etches, a Roatán local, and Aaron's pregnant wife, Christine, experienced a forgiving preview of "God's thunderclap"—in which an object that plummets below its maximum depth suffers roughly the same plight as a mosquito being squashed between clapping hands. Because of a design flaw (which Stanley says he's fixed), the smaller of the sub's two passenger windows cracked at a depth far shallower than the 3,000 feet to which Stanley had designed Idabel to go.

"That's going to be expensive!" Stanley cried, flashing his acute sense of humor and frugal disposition just before water began spraying in. They made it to the surface safely, but the experience still haunts Etches, a 33-year-old rough-and-tumble bar owner. "I have nightmares about that sub," he says.

After hearing this story, I reconcile my misgivings about going down again with a numbers game of questionable logic. Stanley's never been to 2,400 feet, but after overhauling Idabel last fall, he's ready to explore a new maximum depth. In conventional submarines this type of testing is done in a compression chamber without passengers, but Stanley has made a career out of being a guinea pig, and after 1,080 dives, he's still alive. He might be audacious, but he's not suicidal. The Kool-Aid tastes better when we're both drinking it.