Have $125,000 Laying Around? If So, You Can Take A Submarine To Visit The Titanic Wreckage!
Xavier DESMIER. Getty Images.
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Bloomberg- In normal times, thousands of travelers each year cruise across the Northern Atlantic, passing 2.4 miles above the site where the Titanic landed when it went down in 1912. In the years since the catastrophe, a couple of hundred scientists, researchers, occasional scavengers, and Oscar-winning filmmakers have reached the ocean’s bottom voluntarily.
Stockton Rush, president of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate Expeditions, is hoping to make it more common on his privately owned five-person sub via dive expeditions and research missions to take place several weeks annually, from May to September. Rush says he has three dozen people booked for the first six diving expeditions from May to July, with additional spaces available.
While he says he’s not looking to turn the Unesco-protected Titanic into a tourist site, he is attempting to make money. The nine so-called “mission specialists” allowed on each expedition—three on each dive—will pay $125,000 for an eight-day sail from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Their single dive will take six to eight hours to reach the Titanic site, explore, and return to the surface ship.
During the dives, paying passengers will be regarded as citizen scientists expected to assist in a technical survey of the wreck and what Rush says is the Titanic’s debris field, which stretches 25 square nautical miles. “All the bones are gone. There are no bodies down there. There are boots and shoes and clothes that show where people were 100 years ago, and that is very somber,” he says. More than 1,500 lost their lives when the British passenger ship sank in the 1912 disaster.
Two quick thoughts on this:
1. Being able to casually throw around a quarter million dollars for two trips to the most famous shipwreck on the planet (because what type of weirdo visits a watery tomb alone?) is such a baller move. Going up to the starboard hull front of the boat and acting like Leo DiCaprio is for Poors stuck in middle management that spend their lives on the open seas as mere passengers on shitty booze cruises.
If some of the schlubs here at Barstool can weasel their way onto a private jet, I imagine that the yacht industry has been flooded by the same type of riff raff. However, getting to act like Leo after Rose essentially murdered his ass in colder blood than his watery grave you are about to visit is as VIP as it gets considering the Titanic is a massive part of American history, world history, and even box office history.
2. You have to be a fucking LUNATIC to actually throw around thousands of dollars to take the plunge and visit the Titanic, no matter how baller it is. You know why? This is why!
Rush, who augmented his inherited wealth via angel investing and venture investing, has attempted two expeditions to the Titanic, but both were scuttled. In 2018, during testing in the Bahamas, his sub was hit by lightning and the electrical system destroyed. In 2019, the project was canceled because of last-minute problems with the vendor for the “mother ship” that was to transport both the expedition team and equipment. For the 2021 expeditions, Rush has three small research ships in mind.
Not only is visiting the wreckage of a supposed unsinkable ship likely filled to the brim with ghosts the epitome of bad juju, but going in a submarine captained by a dude that is 0-for-2 in expeditions due to equipment failure and an act of fucking God seems like you are just tempting fate. I'll be just fine watching footage of it from my very warm, very dry home.
However, if Steve Cohen wants to buy this guy's company and send any Met reliever that blows a big game down to the most famous shipwreck in human history, that would be fine by me. Beats the hell out of when the Wilpons would threaten to send 20-something pro athletes to Triple A in Las Vegas. I know my owner is loved right now. But there is something extra special about a billionaire when he can motivate his employees with the threat of banishing them to a haunted abyss. Maybe that's why Trevor Bauer was dressed like one of the bougie people from The Titanic last night…