YachtForums Exclusive: Underwater Pictures of Sunk Bertram 630

The rudder has been completely pulled away from its housing and is hanging by its linkage. A close up view shows the bronze thru-hull fitting for the rudder has been subject to a huge amount of stress. This is the most perplexing part of this incident. To break the rudder from it's housing would have required a tremendous impact.

Here's the linkage holding the rudder on the inside of the hull. You might ask, how are we able to see the inside of the hull through the transom? See the following image...

The entire transom has been ripped off the boat! This picture is looking forward, from the corner of the port transom, where the cockpit is clearly seen. If the boat stuffed a wave, causing a catastrophic full failure, how could this energy transmit to the transom? Torsional stresses? Or was the impact of the transom hitting the sea bottom?

Descending to eye-level and zooming in on the exposed cockpit floor, you can see the foam core blocks that made up the laminate. If you look up, that's the aft deckhouse and entrance to the salon.

From the opposite angle, standing on the cockpit floor, looking aft to the (lack of) transom. What you see in the background is the sea bottom.

DETAILS​

We're going to move into some detailed images of the laminate for YF's composite engineers to study. We've all seen the aftermath of high speed stuffs with offshore raceboats. The destruction here is quite similar and equally as startling. One might expect this level of destruction as a result of impacting a wave in excess of 75 mph, but certainly NOT at the top speed of a sportfish convertible.

In this picture, one of the bulkheads has separated from the hull. This is on the inside of starboard hull, just aft of where the front deck broke away. You can clearly see the bulkhead as shifted back and pulled away from the hull...

Just forward of the image above, this is where the starboard side of the hull has sheered away, leaving frayed strands of fiber.

Wiring that runs forward to the bow was pulled backwards, cutting through the hull, when the deck was ripped off...

Rising from the inside of the starboard hull and moving over to the fracture section on the port side, where the top of the deck meets the upswing of the deckhouse, this close-up shows the foam core, along with inner and outer skins that make up the sandwich laminate. Here, the laminate appears to be well-adhered. It was immense force that caused the break.

But the construction of the hull is a different story. Here, a sheet of coring is clearly separated from the hull...

Remember the earlier picture where a wire ripped through the laminate when the deck came off? Well here's the profile view showing the separation. The outer hull skin and gelcoat is seen to the left, the core is in-between and adhered to the inside skin.

From another angle, this picture was taken from just above the boat, forward of the flybridge. A starboard bulkhead is located to the right side of the image. That piece of fiberglass that is shooting off to the left of the picture WAS the inside skin to the hull. If you look to the bottom left, you can see an access hatch on the floor of the v-berth floor...

This picture was taken from the flybridge, looking down to where you would normally see a long foredeck. Now, we can see the floor of the v-berth coming to a point down below...

The flybridge helm is still intact, but has shifted backwards into the helm seats.

With this last picture, we're putting you in the helm seat and asking one question...


What happened here?​

Wisdom is welcome. Follow this link... Bottom Seeking Bertram

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