Bertram 630 Sportfish Sinks?

During the filming of Hunt for Red October in the Catalina Channel.

People keep saying this, but they have no idea what they're talking about.

Just because Bertram denies it doesn't mean that's what the court will find. The words "class action" come to mind - and product liability denials don't hold any water in court, no pun intended.

The new owners may have no legal liability, but they might find they've spent an inordinate amount of money for goodwill (an intangible business asset) which becomes significantly devalued as a result of this hard-line stance, on top of the cost of litigation.

Product liability insurance is a bargain in comparison.

Oh, I suspect that that is already in play.

Crafty Lawyer + unhappy 630 owners who are stuck with boats that are difficult (perhaps impossible) to sell because of this mess = Nasty Class Action Suit.

Yeah, and depending on how the reorganization happened, there is a good chance that liability is continuous from the old company to the new.

And to the next.

Now that I have seen the video, I am even more so amazed with the amount of destruction through-out. There is no way that anyone at this time can convince me that all that destruction was caused by faulty construction. I still believe that something happened in route, that caused this Bertram to sink.

There won't be a next. Mismanagement of events like this is what retires marques. The Bertram name (and that's all it is anymore, a good name being traded on by a conglomerate that they may judge it not worth the cost of saving) may or may not survive this. Considering Ferretti groups position, if it costs more to salvage the name than they can sell it for, they have no real reason to do it. They already own the assets and if the name is dead it doesn't compete with their other lines. Oldsmobile was a much longer and deeply entrenched marque and it went away, and so will Pontiac. Two of the founding marques of General Motors.

The old Bertram is already long gone.

You're correct as long as you count "enroute" anything since the boat left the mold. There were issues in construction as well, but those were not enough in and of themselves to cause the failure we see here (neither is that bouy, though it may have added link 5 into the 6 link accident chain).

I am quite certain that the boat saw a hard docking driving the bow with about a 75* approach (typical dock approach angle) into the dock. That would set up a line of micro fracturing that is conducive with the type and location of where the hull initially failed on the port bow side. People comment about how thin the glass is, and it is. Thing is, when you run the engineering numbers, in an undamaged state, it is plenty. Problem is, it can only absorb extremely limited damage before it is structurally compromised. Now you have a boat with all these tiny cracks in the matrix that are totally invisible to the eye. Thing is though, it is cracked, and those cracks concentrate the stresses of every bounce and every wave it ever takes, and those fractures spread, and since force takes the path of least resistance, they spread within the damage line continuously multiplying and growing until you have no structure actually left there, but you may not be ale to see this under the paint or gelcoat. Eventually you cross the threshold of strength and induced force and you get a catastrophic failure like this.

I've seen this same thing in small composite airplanes where a small bit of hangar rash on the wing lead to a section of the wing top to peel off. That's the main problem with composite structures, many of the failure modes don't lend themselves to inspection discovery much less casual discovery. The first indicator of failure is typically catastrophic. In the past we protected ourselves from this by adding more mass. Well, these days in the chase for speed and to save money on materials, we build closer and closer to the engineering limits. The closer we are to engineering limits, the more engineering perfect the execution of construction has to be. At this point, a hot mix of resin, or applying it outside of climatic tolerances for maximum performance now takes a bump on the dock that would have been within engineered tolerances and puts it outside. Now it's only time before the failure is catastrophic.

The accident in this case could have occurred at any time in the boats life, but I bet at least a year ago.

Agreed. But whats this business of reorganization? Bertram is still bertram, regardless of what kind of reorganization Ferretti group has undergone. As far as I know the only reorganization that occurred was the purchase of Allied Richard Bertram Marine Group by ferretti group and the subsequent killing of one of the greatest names in the yacht brokerage and service world (Richard Bertram & Company, Richard Bertram Yacht Sales) in favor of Allied Marine Group. Also, I've been told that although MM still has Bertram's in stock, they were all to be bought back by Bertram/Ferretti when MM gave up representing them. Just dock talk that I over heard, any truth in that?

I cannot speak to the Bertram-MM relationship, I have no clue as to that or how disolution of the relationship was dealt with in their contract. At some point dealership inventory is transferred into stock though.

This will be true if posts like this float around. I have joined the team of Bertram salesmen, and know that this product is a sound investment. There is a community of owners that will always be "Bert". Lets face it all of the "professional" accts of the insident are well noted. I have not come to a conclusion, but, it is a tragedy what ever the cause.

Thank God that no one was sereiously injured.

The owner is suffering a $1.8MM injury.....

We towed alot on the east coast (the Tam was the CG ship in the "perfect storm, 6 months after I had gotten out)
1 & 2 were my points, sorry if I wasn't clear.

Back in the

Late 70's early 80's a sub snagged a trawl on a fishing boat off San Francisco.

The trwler disappeared but the sub showed up the next day with the conning tower covered in net.

All that was ever found of the trawler was shredded pieces from where she broke apart.

I must have missed that part about being pulled what exactly was meant by that? I can see how the boat would be moved, drifted, but would it be pulled by currents? Or are they talking about something actually pulling the boat?

Glass and gelcoat are not that resilent , If the bond was correct the amount of force that would have been exherted to break the bond would have left significant fracturing damage visible where the collision had taken place.

And the collision area should have been isolated and the rest of the bond should of held tight.


Hell who knows if they even glass the hull and deck together. Most producton boats are machined screwed or rivited at the seam with a little 5200 thrown in for good measure.Maybe a couple of thru bolted areas.

There was no direct relationship between the damage down lower and the deck joint (unless the shock of that impact also started the fracturing there of more brittle than engineered for resin). Perhaps if it had only been one failure or the other, the end result would not have been so severe, but as I said earlier, this was a situation of multiple issues reaching a nexxus which led to this failure. The deck joint was weak enough that it failed as well. Where it failed catastrophically first is really irrelevant since the events were only fractions of a second apart as is typical with monocoque type construction.

Most likely the impact was down where the hull separated and tore away in a nice straight line. Due to the flexation available, the same incident could have easily started the crack on the deck to hull joint as well as I suspect it was as brittle as the rest appears. I also will not discount another hard docking that put the rail into a piling. I watch people beat boats into docks all the time.

You are assuming that there was a good bond and the material condition was as intended. I think material/construction inadequacy is the first link in this chain of events.