The Antipodes submarine, pictured here in an undated photo during a dive, is for sale. OceanGate
A yacht broker looking to sell an OceanGate submersible doesn’t think it will ever sell.
The five-person Antipodes submersible is for sale for $795,000.
The broker told Business Insider he “didn’t want anything more to do with the ship.”
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Do you want to buy an OceanGate submersible? It costs $795,000. But the yacht broker, who has been trying to sell the ship for five years, doesn’t think he’ll ever find a buyer – and now simply wants to get rid of the old Stockton Rush submarine.
“I want nothing more to do with it,” Steve Reoch, an expeditionary yacht broker who sold his first boat in 1979, told Business Insider just weeks after another OceanGate submarine, the Titan, during a Mission imploded.
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The Titan submersible only reached Titanic’s depth on 13 out of 90 dives, according to the waiver that passengers had to sign
The Antipodes submersible first appeared in Reoch’s life when OceanGate contacted him and asked him to sell it for them as he had represented sales of other submersibles over the years.
The ship was built in 1996 by Patrick Lahey for Perry Submersibles. It went through “multiple people and multiple owners” before ending up at OceanGate when Stockton Rush bought the Antipodes as the company’s first submersible, according to Reoch.
The three-foot-long submarine is currently listed for nearly $800,000 and is based in Everett, Washington, where OceanGate’s headquarters are located. According to the ad, the Antipodes can go as deep as about 1,000 feet into the ocean for “deepwater expeditions” to “exploit underwater environments.”
“With six individual 5hp electric heaters is Antipodes Extremely maneuverable at depth and offers the pilot and the crew of up to four a lot of comfort on the sub’s website.
Reoch said Rush used Antipodes for a number of dives under OceanGate and that all were “successful”. One of those trips was a shark-watching expedition that included rapper Macklemore as a passenger. “Everyone came back well,” said Reoch.
Notably, the Antipodes was classified by the American Bureau of Shipping – meaning she was inspected to see if she met industry standards – while Rush’s Titan submarine, which imploded en route to Titanic, was not classified, according to Reoch.
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OceanGate boasted that it would detect failures in Titan’s hull “long before crew safety would be compromised”.
But as OceanGate began building the second submersible, the Cyclops, Reoch received a call from Rush asking him to sell Antipodes. Meanwhile, OceanGate continued to charter the Antipodes while Reoch attempted to sell her.
Reoch said there has been interest in the submarine for the past five years, but that the potential buyers were “not serious” or were “nuts,” he told Business Insider. In fact, Reoch has attempted to sell a number of classified dive boats throughout his career, particularly to large expedition yacht owners, but has never managed to sell a boat.
In the case of the Antipodes, after five quiet years on the market, Reoch is certain that the submarine cannot now be sold. For one, Reoch told Business Insider that the Antipodes “is likely to face years of litigation” since OceanGate, the ship’s owner, halted “all exploration and trading activity” last week.
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During a test dive, the submarine Titan got out of control – the passengers were stuck under water for two hours
He said he will be dropping the offer in the coming weeks, noting that someone may want to buy the ship but that he doesn’t want to be involved in the sale because of the legal battle. Not that it matters, he says. Reoch doesn’t think the submersible will be of interest to any buyer, “especially now because of the relationship with OceanGate”.
“We’re in the process of disposing of the vessel because it’s not selling,” Reoch told Business Insider, “no one will be able to sell the submersible for years because of the litigation — it’s a waste of my time, and… have been for five years.”
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