A two-person submarine that has never touched the water is for sale through a New Zealand connection, and the money isn’t going into a private seller’s pocket. It’s funding ocean conservation instead.
Boating New Zealand spoke with listing agent Paul MacDonald about the listing, a Nemo submersible built by Dutch manufacturer U-Boat Worx and donated, unused, to the ocean conservation charity SeaKeepers.
How a donated submarine ends up for sale
SeaKeepers got its start in Monaco in 1998, when six yacht owners liked the idea of turning their own boats into research platforms. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen came on board a few years later, in 2001, as one of five owners using an early ocean-monitoring device called the SeaKeeper 1000 to collect atmospheric and oceanic readings. That early, high-profile involvement helped the organisation expand well beyond Monaco. It now runs chapters in the US, UK, Asia and the South Pacific.
The South Pacific chapter is based in Auckland and only opened its doors in 2023. It operates through registered charitable trusts in New Zealand and Australia, and on the Australian side, that trust holds Deductible Gift Recipient status, so donors there can claim a tax benefit. Owners hand over a boat, or in this case a submarine, and SeaKeepers turns the asset into funding, and sometimes into ongoing scientific work as well.
For bigger assets, the charity generally tries to line up a buyer alongside the donation, since it can’t afford to sit on something that size indefinitely. An unnamed donor gifted a brand-new Nemo, and SeaKeepers is now selling it on to raise funds for the organisation. MacDonald’s contact at SeaKeepers South Pacific is Lance Sheppard, the chapter’s CEO and a trustee of its New Zealand charitable trust. At the top of the wider organisation sits Norma Trease, appointed interim CEO in June 2026. She spent years in yachting industry leadership before that, including stints with Dryad Global, Marina Port Vell in Barcelona and Only Yacht in Monaco.
What the sub can actually do
The Nemo is U-Boat Worx’s smallest model, a two-seater built around the company’s signature acrylic sphere, which gives both occupants an uninterrupted view out. It’s rated to dive to 100 metres, powered by four electric thrusters, and covers roughly 1.65 kilometres of range from wherever the support boat is anchored. Underwater, it moves at around three knots. Covering any real distance from the mother ship takes patience more than speed.
At around 2.5 tonnes and roughly the footprint of two jet skis parked side by side, it’s light enough to store in a superyacht’s tender garage. U-Boat Worx also sells beach launchers, towable trailers and floating “sub houses” for owners without a yacht to launch from. The sub is fully sealed and self-contained, with its own life-support systems, and occupants climb in through a top hatch. It stays fully manoeuvrable on the surface as well as below it, since the thrusters sit underwater even when the Nemo itself is floating.
U-Boat Worx delivered its first production Nemo in 2021. When the company moved the model into volume production the following year, list prices for the one and two-seat versions dropped by around 40 percent, down to €545,000 and €590,000 respectively. Founder Bert Houtman talked publicly at the time about wanting a thousand Nemos in operation worldwide by the end of the decade. Back in 2019, when U-Boat Worx first floated the concept and before it had entered production, the asking price sat above US$1 million.
The numbers
MacDonald puts the Nemo‘s retail value new at around US$1.9 million. SeaKeepers is asking US$1.4 million for this one, a saving of roughly half a million US dollars on a submarine that has never been in the water. MacDonald says he’s still confirming the exact year of manufacture with the charity.
Whether it counts as a straightforward boat sale or a charitable transaction is a bit of both, MacDonald says. Money changes hands, but it goes toward an organisation that has run more than 500 science projects worldwide since 1998, using a network of roughly 250 partner vessels for scientist-led expeditions, citizen science, education and community outreach.
For the right explorer yacht or coastal property owner, a brand-new submarine at half a million off list, with the money going straight into ocean research, is a fairly unusual thing to stumble across. SeaKeepers South Pacific has been busy this year regardless of how this particular sale lands, with Gulf Harbour Marina on Auckland’s Whangaparāoa Peninsula signing on as its newest marina partner in July.
Check it out on MCD: https://www.mcdyachts.com/uboatnemo
