Bertram 630 Sportfish Sinks?

I'd say if that boat hit that bouy hard enough to do that damaged, the whole thing would look like the dogs breakfast, but yet it stands square. That means either the bouy is unhit or the boat was weaker than it should have been. Neither is good for Bertram's case....

A lot of people here are envisioning the boat hitting the buoy. Think more in terms a it running into a 3" diameter, blunt ended steel spear. That explains the high hit, the deck being raised and the buoy sustaining little damage as it would be driven down, under the boat.
Shazam, those are very bold statements. Anything to back them up?

Personal experience with the core in question, their factory was located down the street from mine, we were constantly inundated with salesmen from over there trying to sell us that junk. The few test panels that we did laminate with that core appeared fine at first then about two days later they started developing bubbles inside the laminate. I was sure the core or the resin was contaminated, so we threw out the panels and started another set of test panels, two days later we had the same problem again. Turns out what was happening was that the core material wasn't fully cured causing the core to outgass while we laminated the test panels creating bubbles in the lamination. After the core was fully cured the test panels were left with huge voids, imagine if that were in a hull, sooner or later the two skins surrounding the core would come apart until the voids got large enough to create "catastrophic delamination".

As far as the air conditioning contractor doing all the lamination, that's common knowledge.

If you were in So Fl in '91 you know that a fence pole can go through the walls of a house unscathed, even a 2x4 can. I doubt the buoy itself was more than barely touched.

I was and remember the damage done by flying objects. I also remember miamis waterfront littered with storm damaged boats that had been tossed around in gusts of wind over 200 mph AND NEVER SAW A SINGLE BOAT OF THIS CALIBER DAMAGED LIKE THIS 630. If andrew couldnt do this kind of destruction to a big battlewagon then how the hell did that bouy do it?

Frankly, I'm insulted by bertrams "buoy theory", bertram blaming the boat falling apart on an Al Qaeda planted bomb is more believable.

Here's a great challenge for an up and coming SF builder. Send a boat up to that buoy and strike it while running at 25 knots, if the boat doesn't fall apart then you have a winner!

You mean like a jingle to an advert or something?

"Yep, you can hit a buoy at 22kts, and keep on keepin' on...."
-Acme Boats, Anytown, USA.

How does that happen? Look at the angle of incidence between the mast on the bouy and the point of impact. In order for the bouy to act as a spear there he would have been running into a 7kt current and strong winds. At the angle a bouy sits combined with the taper and dead rise of the bow, it can be no more than a glancing blow on a bouy with probably no more than a few hundred pounds bouyancy floating in water. There's nothing there to act as the reactionary to that delivery of force. Remember, for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Think of the force required for that mast to puncture that hull and lift the deck, do you think that that bouy has the bouyancy required to equally counter that force? Plus there was absolutely no damage to the radar reflector. If it would have speared the hull that thing would have been mutilated. Every bit of damage caused to that boat that you can attribute to that bouy required a set amount of force. In order to cause that damage, an equal amount of force would be delivered to the bouy as well. That bouy is only 200 lbs including the ballast. That means the upper framework is made out of relatively thin wall material. It shows absolutely no evidence of seeing anything approaching the forces that would be required to create that failure in the mode you are expressing.

and plus the buoy was pretty much static (give and take the pitch and roll). to me it would be like hitting paper with a pin... but in this case the reflector would have been detroyed when that came in contact. (and its bolted on, no rivets). cheers

im confident to take that buoy out of the equation...?

SHAZAM!, im a up and coming SF builder, can u fund the challenge

far

when you look at hurricane damage, solid glass boats show a lot of grinding and scraping before the hull fails, it takes a long time to happen.

on the otherhand, look at cored hulls... often there are no or very signs of repeated grinding agasint the dock or pilings. Here are a few pics i took of an older cored Ferreti, at Dinner Key, after Wilma. It stayed afloat since the damage was above WL, but you can see the hull failed with very little scraping.

as to the mast impaling the bow, i still dont' buy it. the mast woudl be completly mangled or gone and the odds of the angle being such that it would actually penetrate are zilch

Don't discount that pitch and roll nor the buoys boyancy. All you need is for the boat to be coming down off even a small wave and have the down motion contact before the forward motion. Any pitch at all would just make it easier. Delamination just makes no sense, a) it's too high up, so there's no water preasure to precipitate it, and the hole would have stayed above water. b) How do you account for the deck being pealed back? Now, I'm not a lover of Ferretti's Bertrams and there has definitely been some delamination in their line, but IMHO this doesn't fit. No, if I were the captain I'd be expecting to get very poor very soon. The difference of opinions here reads settlement with everybody losing some, except the lawyers.

How can we believe that the boat was indeed going 24 knots? If that boat was a 40 knot boat very few folks run at 24 knots- they'd be doing a cruise of 27-33 knots. I run at 22 knots as my top end (1988 65 R/Donzi) is 30-31 knots and I see very few other boats running as slow as me, especially when they can run faster. If he was running faster then he could have come off a wave and hit the buoy with a downward motion- spearing the buoy. Could that have started the deck peeling off? WDK, but it sure seems like a million to one chance. If the deck was secured to the hull like it ought to be the buoy should have just made a spear hole- not peel back the whole deck. Peeling back the whole deck fits some of the captains first statements that the hull "folded". That seems to say he had water at least up to the rubrail at the bow which pushed the deck up and off the hull sides- ie stuffing the bow. Stuffing the bow is more likely at higher speeds- higher than 24 knots, but it is possible to stuff the bow at 24 knots.
I also agree that the photos seem to show little damage to the running gear. The rudder has no visible strike marks, nor does the hull below the waterline.
At this time my speculation is that he stuffed the bow in a wave and the deck ripped off. It's also my opinion that with proper construction a 63 foot SF should be able to stuff the bow and NOT have the deck rip off.

Dig out the old high school physics books, Henning.

F=MA

Buoyancy has nothing to do with it.

I think delamination makes a lot of sense, not jsut considering previous incidents. Above waterline, at the bow, is where the stresses will be the highest since it's further from the keel where the sides meet. Most of the reinforcement (stringers, floor, etc... ) are also down low.

sure, if Mars is aligned with moon and Venus is at a 90deg angle, then things may align just right for the mast to be at a 61.45 degree angle. =and how do you account for the lack of damage to the mast? if that thing pierced the hull, and pushed the deck up, it came right out of the hole at 25kts unscathed?

come on...

Delamination no delamination all I see is a Bertram bash. If it was a delamintion so be it. This is a marquee brand that will rectify their issues and move on. I had my doubts as to if I would want one for my return to boating. Now I have none. I will follow in my family's tradition and get one for myself.

All marquee brands have issues; Boeing with their jets, Ferrari with their cars (lord knows I am very familiar with this last one....ummm how you say in Italian very beautiful sour lemon). They rectify the problems and move on. What sets a company apart is tradition, customer service, and been able to come back stronger from adversity.

What I have learned from all these 300 plus threads from naval architecs, marine engineers, and senior class society surveyors (read lloyds, DNV, ABS etc) wannabes is as follows:

1) Get insurance
2) Get some more insurance
3) Get even some more insurance
4) Hire competent Mariners

With a good insurance this thread would have passed on about 15 pages ago. The owner would be well on his way to a new boat and regretfully the captain headed for a food service industry job.

My 0.2 c

of course all brands have issues, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

first, your car analogy holds less water than a delaminated boat ... if you suffer an drive train failure in your Ferrari, you can pull over, call for a tow and deal with the dealer. Boeing has the NTSB and FAA to deal with acting as watch dogs...

when the hull of that battlewagon delaminates 100 miles offshore, you're in deep doodoo...

big difference, it's not so be it.

i can't speak for others who posted on this thread, but my gripe is not with a specific brand, it's with this obsession to build boats lighter and lighter, to get them faster than the competition, resulting in builders experimenting with technologies that, while proven in other segment of the industry, are not always appropriate for the intended use and also not applied with proper quality control.

that is the problem thaa as owners and/or captains we have to deal with. Seems to me liek Bertram is in denial over teh issue, although i hope this is the public message and that they are hard at work finding solutions to the problem.

good luck "following in your family's tradition", you will probably find yourself wishing that Ferreti had followed Bertram family traditions as well.

Somehow I think it goes to deeper issues than that.

I would prefer to have more between me and the ocean floor than an insurance policy.

Maybe all are not "wannabes."

While F=MA works perfectly in a vacuum with solid objects, wouldn't the buoyancy of the buoy change its effective "mass" for purposes of determining the forces involved in the impact? I would think that the buoy's resistance to being forced under water would translate in to increased force against the boat. How much that force is increased would depend on the buoyancy of the buoy.