Owner wins claim against UK builder

  • Thread starter Thread starter Asm
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The article states he ran aground in santa Ponsa bay, I bet he hit the line of rocks that run up the centre of the bay whose start and end are marked by hard to spot poles.
 
On my reading of the full judgement , I think he was a bit lucky to win ....judge did not seem too concerned about some errors in his evidence!
 
He looks well dodgy lol.

On a more important note this is so clearly human error, these rocks must have been on a chart? As a skipper your responsible for safe passage planning and transits, Was he not keeping a track of his position?
 
They seem to have ruled that there was a defect that made things a whole lot worse. What your saying is similar to a drunk driver saying "it wasn't my fault", tough, your pissed. He was totally at fault for the grounding, but had there been no defect, then there would have been no court case. I'm also pretty sure, no matter how dodgy he looks, the 1st he knew of the problem was when the boat was pulled out & someone, probably yardhands or an insurance surveyor made a comment
 
On Pearl's website is shows that "Temptation 2" has been sold.

When you have major newspapers reporting on this, whenever you search for Pearl Motor yachts, the article in the Telegraph appears!
 
Yikes. Pearl build 2-6 yachts annually, average selling price say £1m, so sales of around £4m. Yacht builders operating margins are typically low, and they now have to swallow a judgement of about £500k + probably another £200k at least in costs of both sides. I wish them the best, though I've read the whole judgement and it seems fair, so I wonder why they chose to fight it. They didn't even dispute that the area that suffered damage was 5 times weaker than it should have been.
 
+2. Despite crummy evidence it looks like the judge got this right and yes it is very surprising pearl fought it. I don't want to say the lawyers were crummy but I don't think there will be any huge queue for their services anytime soon. Must be a severe blow to pearl who are micro but it's hard to find huge sympathy if they are building P bracket mounting zones in 7 mm grp.

The other 60 mentioned in the judgement, Bacchus, was the tenant in my berth in Antibes for 6 months, a couple of years ago and I've been on it a few times. It displays pretty poor build quality generally IMHO. Things like decks that have depressions so puddles form when it rains, for example. This boat changed my view of pearl in terms of their 2007-10 period of the 55/60
 
jfm said:
Must be a severe blow to pearl who are micro but it's hard to find huge sympathy if they are building P bracket mounting zones in 7 mm grp.
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My search for a fisher led me to read the Arvor owners forum. One poster had a new 25ft boat and took his heart in his mouth to drill a hole in the hull for a fishfinder transducer, reckoning it would be quite a job to get through the thickest part of the hull without pro equipment. He was shocked to find that he went through in moments, it being rather thinner than he expected. It was 7mm. Strange it was the same as the Pearl, though maybe more excusable on a mid-market 25ft boat :)
 
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Jurgen said:
On a more important note this is so clearly human error, these rocks must have been on a chart? As a skipper your responsible for safe passage planning and transits, Was he not keeping a track of his position?
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The shallows in the middle of Santa Ponsa bay are well marked on the chart and by stakes so you'd have to be pretty stupid to drive your boat on to them but given that it is a popular anchorage, its unlikely that the boat hit them at any speed so IMHO the owner had the right to expect his boat not to sink as a result. Yes I'm surprised too that Pearl defended the case given such an obvious failure to meet the specification.
 
+3 why take the risk of a court case.

A manager of a local restaurant chain gave me a good insight which applies to us boaters.

He said the best restaurants to manage were the ones with holiday makers that meant you didn't need to rely on repeat business and when something went wrong everyone didn't hear about and not go.

Why didn't Pearl just fix the boat, give him some cash and keep it all quiet rather than it being in the national newspapers and all over this forum.
 
Based on the facts available I would have thought 'damage limitation' would be a managerial priority, obviously not the case here.

Some very strange decision making, imho.
 
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