Personal submarines make a splash
What to get the superyacht owner who has everything? Their own personal submarine to explore the ocean floor, writes Claire Wrathall
Among the obscurer objects of desire for sale at last year’s Monaco Yacht Show were the latest in Deepflight’s range of “personal submarines” – no superyacht toy cupboard can be considered complete without one – notably the two-seater Dragon (from $1.2 million), an electrically powered zero-emissions submersible capable of running for up to six hours between charges and descending to a depth of 120m, the so-called edge of darkness, in that this is the depth at which daylight ceases to penetrate, without ballast or weights.
In the insanely competitive world of megayacht one-upmanship, however, GSE Trieste have gone one better, or at least deeper. Its new VAS 525/60 sub plumbs new depths of up to 160m (it has lights, obviously), taking you to places no civilian has ever visited, and can stay submerged for eight long hours as it hovers over the ocean floor, ranging up to 25 nautical miles, at a speed of up to six knots.
It claims to be large enough for four to five adults as well as two pilots, but despite its comparatively roomy-sounding dimensions (it’s 8.4m long, with a maximum beam of 2.4m and a height of 2.6m), passengers are seated on narrow banquets that face each other, but there are only two portholes, so if there are four of you, two will be facing the wall. (The pilots’ views – though a huge convex circular “windscreen” – ought to be sensational though.)
It comes as no surprise then that the sub is built to a military-grade specification in order to conform to the standards set by the US Coast Guard, and naval subs, as any fule kno, are not built for sight-seeing.
It’s for sale through Y.CO, the most fun, least stuffy for the British-owned yacht brokerages. As its co-founder and chairman Gary Wright put it (with no little understatement) in an email from Ice Camp Barneo, a Russian-operated drift station on the frozen Arctic from which he was poised to trek to the North Pole in aid of the Royal Marines Charitable Trust Fund and the Lewis Moody Foundation, “It does offer adventure.” (He would know.) “It’s completely custom-made, yellow” (nul points for originality when it comes to colour choice) and will afford its “new owner the chance to discover the ocean from a completely new perspective and to explore undiscovered waters in comfort and safety.” Certainly there isn’t another sub like it on the domestic market.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/travel/66468/personal-submarines-make-a-splash.html
