Talk about damaged goods

Back in the day (think Gilded Age), rich folks bought seaside "cottages" (think mansions) and private railroad cars to schlep them from NYC to Newport, or wherever else they summered. (I've toured the private car owned by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe's son, who was president of the Pullman Company. He used to to get from his home in Chicago and, later, Washington DC, to Hildene, his getaway place in Manchester, VT, comfortably ensconced in his private car. Nice perk!)

Fast forward and the big moneyed class is still buying second (third, fourth, fifth...homes), and they travel between and among homes (and the site of the sports teams they own) using their private jets. They also seem to buy an awful lot of superyachts. (Think Jeff Bezos, who - it was rumored - was going to have to dismantle a bridge in Rotterdam to get his super-duper yacht out of the shipbuilding yard. Ship ahoy!) 

And, while anyone can have a speedboat or two to use as a superyacht dinghy, it's a lot more fun if you have a superyacht to also have a submarine of your very own. 

Thus, in Gilded Age, Take Two, rich folks started buying luxury submarines, paying a couple of millionaire bucks for that little goodie. 

Given how much private submarines go for, you'd think that s submersible going for $800K would be a bargain.

Too much of a bargain, I guess.

First off, a submersible doesn't give you the full submarine experience. In a submarine, you're diving and surfacing on your own, while a submersible needs a mothership (such as a superyacht) to guide it in and out of the drink. So, for starters, it's a poor man's submarine.

Then there's the fact that the submersible for sale wasn't particularly luxe. And it's old. Vintage 1973. So almost the age of a used U-Boat. 

And this $800K submersible has been languishing on the market for five years. From the real estate market we are all, of course, aware that when your home is on the market for a while, the listing gets stale - and the asking price drops.

Then there's the real killer, metaphorically speaking. (Or not.) The most recent owner of the Antipodes is none other than OceanGate, most recently in the news for the implosion of their latter-day submersible, the Titan. 

No, OceanGate didn't build the Antipodes. But, they own it, and used it for expeditions (albeit more modest that diving to the floor to ogle the remains of the Titanic. Having any association with the OceanGate brand isn't going to help matters any.

So the broker who's been kinda-sorts trying to unload it for the past five years is ready to cry 'Uncle.'

"I don't want to have anything to do with it," Steve Reoch, an expedition-yacht broker who sold his first boat in 1979, told Insider just weeks after another OceanGate sub, the Titan, catastrophically imploded on a mission. (Source: Insider)

Can't blame Reoch if he wants out. If he couldn't unload it before OceanGate became a household word, just imagine trying to sell it now. Seriously, who would buy a used OceanGate submersible? Every moment spent in that submersible you'd have your ear trained for the telltale creak that it and you might be under an awful lot of pressure. 

Anyway, if the $800K price tag is out the window, what might you do with the submersible if you could get it on the cheap?

I guess you could put it in your garden as a convo piece. Maybe use that front section as a greenhouse sort of thing. It's 13 1/2 feet long, so might make a cool little playhouse for the kiddos. Or you could just use it on the surface, tow it around behind your superyacht, taking in the scenery. Maybe get up close and personal with sharks and/or dolphins. 

For any of the above scenarios, the price would have to be pretty close to zero.

A far cry from $800K. 

But talk about damaged goods...