Owner wins claim against UK builder

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I've just read the statement, why on earth would he say he could see the crack as the p brackets are covered by the bed and floor assembly in the aft cabin, unless of course he spent a few hours dismantling furniture while the bilge pumps were going crazy.
Its obvious the legal team didn't even understand the nature and design of the build style, had it been an open cockpit boat you can see the p bracket bolts under a simple hatch which any expert witness could agree and understand.
Total numpty, I don't know much about this case , was an expert marine witness employed on either side?

Two days before this post became live I was sea trailing a P60 doing full lock turns at 32.5 knots, I did wonder what stress was being put on the rudder stocks at this speed, they also stalled when going hard over from lock to lock, not what you should expect in this day and age. Still a great boat though.
 
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I've not read everything above or understood all that I have read, but it seems to me that you need a judge with engineering qualifications & I suspect that that is about as likely as getting honest politicians.

John G
 
petem said:
You're missing my point. If you hit rocks at planing speed you're probably gonna sink a plastic boat (however thick the hull). But hit a sandbank at a lower speed and the difference between 7mm and 20mm may save your life.
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... and you are missing mine.

My calcs suggest that even at c. 6kts, 20mm thickness is unlikely to be adequate for a 30 tonne boat if the full force of the impact is taken by the P bracket (and it transferred that force onto the hull, rather than snapping off). In those circumstances you're gonna need a heck of a lot more than 20mm even at slow speeds.

Maybe ok for a boat under 10 tonnes, but I'm beginning to wonder if GRP alone is adequate for the critical parts of a heavy boat - like the P bracket support in this case.
 
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Angele said:
... and you are missing mine.

My calcs suggest that even at c. 6kts, 20mm thickness is unlikely to be adequate for a 30 tonne boat if the full force of the impact is taken by the P bracket (and it transferred that force onto the hull, rather than snapping off). In those circumstances you're gonna need a heck of a lot more than 20mm even at slow speeds.

Maybe ok for a boat under 10 tonnes, but I'm beginning to wonder if GRP alone is adequate for the critical parts of a heavy boat - like the P bracket support in this case.
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So what you're claiming is that builders are wasting their time mouldling 20mm?

But what about a sand bank, mud or some other surface that might 'give'. This is just as likely, or indeed a more likely a scenario, than hitting rocks. It's these cases that I would think that the additional thickness may be beneficial. Don't you agree?
 
Angele said:
My calcs suggest that even at c. 6kts, 20mm thickness is unlikely to be adequate for a 30 tonne boat if the full force of the impact is taken by the P bracket (and it transferred that force onto the hull, rather than snapping off). In those circumstances you're gonna need a heck of a lot more than 20mm even at slow speeds.

Maybe ok for a boat under 10 tonnes, but I'm beginning to wonder if GRP alone is adequate for the critical parts of a heavy boat - like the P bracket support in this case.
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However, it does not seem that the P bracket took the impact. The initial grounding was the prop hitting the rock and much of the force was absorbed by the shaft bending 15 degrees and no doubt the whole bottom panel flexing, plus the 30 tons mass of boat which at that point was still floating. As I understand it from the description in the judgement, the bottom cracked along the line of the thin part of the moulding around the recess - logical because not only is it a weak point, but it is adjacent to the palm of the P bracket which would create a hard spot as the shaft is levering the bracket upwards (bit of (I hope) educated guesswork here as I have not seen the details of the construction). This crack on its own would not be enough to cause the volume of water ingress needed to cause the damage internally - the crack would have to open up to create a hole, and nowhere is there any evidence of a hole, only of cracks.

The eyewitness reports said it took 17 minutes to settle down on the rock, and my hypothesis is that it settled on the prop/shaft, which caused the crack to open and to extend into main, thicker part of the bottom panel. If the boat had stayed afloat, the crack may not have opened and the pumps would have coped with the trickle of water. That could also explain why the eventual crack was observed (and agreed) at 30" long.

This case seems to bring home the view that a civil court of law is not the place to find the truth as it does not look at the whole story. Instead it concentrates on one aspect required to support the claim - that is proving on the balance of probabilities that the failure to build the boat to the design spec as agreed in the contract is the sole cause of the damage. As a result everything else that might have had an effect is discarded or excluded. Even though there is no factual evidence that was the only point of ingress, nor indeed that its length was only 6" the claimant's case focused solely on building a persuasive story that fitted their claim. As we have seen this led to some questionable assumptions and sloppy methodology which went unchallenged. So, in the absence of any alternate account the decision could only go one way.

It is disappointing that neither party made the effort to carry out an empirical experiment as an alternative to the suspect calculations. I can understand the claimant not wanting to do this as it would risk destroying their case, but surely it would have been in the defendent's interest given the size of the potential loss and its impact on their business.
 
petem said:
Whilst I agree that if Pearl had hired some decent lawyers they might have got away with this but from a moral perspective they were building potentially dangerous boats and they paid the price for this. (JFM, perhaps it's a good thing that you weren't defending them!)

I wonder if this action may lead to a string of claims against Pearl? If I owned one I'd be having it surveyed immediately so I could be at the front of the queue of owners demanding that their vessels are made safe.

Does anyone know what Pearl are going to do to check the other boats they have built (assuming they haven't done this already)? The decent thing would be to check them all for hull thickness. In fact, they should have done this as soon as they learned of the potential issue. I also note that there's no mention of this incident on their website. If they were confident of their product surely they would make a statement to reassure current and potential owners? Perhaps they think this will blow over.
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Just reading through this and think what you have said in this post Petem sums it up nicely.

Do I think the owner is very lucky to get the win he did due to the very poor defence from Pearls legal team? Yes.

But at the end of the day the boat shouldn't have been built like it was. If I was lucky enough to own a boat of that size and value, I'd expect it to be capable of looking after my family through normal use (not running aground on rocks) and as Volvopaul points out in his seatrial, big loads are placed on certain areas of the hull so how long would it have been before something eventually gave.

IMHO a sorry state of affairs. A beautiful boat that should never have been run a ground and a company that's going to be put under a lot of pressure to survive. If only they had done their job properly in the first place they would never find themselves in this position...... I guess hindsight is a wonderful thing.
 
Tranona said:
It is disappointing that neither party made the effort to carry out an empirical experiment as an alternative to the suspect calculations. I can understand the claimant not wanting to do this as it would risk destroying their case, but surely it would have been in the defendent's interest given the size of the potential loss and its impact on their business.
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Hmmm. Not sure I'm convinced on that. What empirical experiment could be performed, even in broad terms? If I were on Pearl's side in this I would concentrate on the claimant's failure to prove his case. It seems to me they were miles away from proving it, if Pearl's side had but made that clear instead of "letting them get away with it".
 
jfm said:
Hmmm. Not sure I'm convinced on that. What empirical experiment could be performed, even in broad terms? If I were on Pearl's side in this I would concentrate on the claimant's failure to prove his case. It seems to me they were miles away from proving it, if Pearl's side had but made that clear instead of "letting them get away with it".
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You could lay up two section of the hull, one to spec and one as built. Install the shaft and P bracket, fix the shaft at the inboard end and apply the load to the prop end. No doubt a clever chap like JD could carry out calculations that are more realistic than the half hearted attempts reported in the judgement which only looked at forces on impact.

As you know it bugs me that no attempt was made to find out how the crack grew in length, nor have they explained how the crack became a big enough hole to allow the large volumes of water in. Again you could experiment with a layup and crack to see what is required to turn it into a hole.
 
Tranona said:
You could lay up two section of the hull, one to spec and one as built. Install the shaft and P bracket, fix the shaft at the inboard end and apply the load to the prop end. No doubt a clever chap like JD could carry out calculations that are more realistic than the half hearted attempts reported in the judgement which only looked at forces on impact.
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Yes, but you would then have merely a numerical value for the forces or pattern of forces that would break (i) a 7mm hull and (ii) a 20mm hull. But you would be no further on with answering the question "Did this particular grounding apply the forces computed under (i) or (ii), and THAT is the critical question. Hence, for the respondents I prefer the tactic of saying that the claimants just haven't proved (on BofP) their hypothesis that this particular grounding would not have broken a 20mm hull.

Tranona said:
As you know it bugs me that no attempt was made to find out how the crack grew in length, nor have they explained how the crack became a big enough hole to allow the large volumes of water in. Again you could experiment with a layup and crack to see what is required to turn it into a hole.
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Agreed and I sympathise! But rather than bugging me it leaves me just thinking that Pearl's team did a crummy job in not pointing out that the claimant (whose job it was) produced no engineeringly sound proof of their hypothesis
 
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Tranona said:
You could lay up two section of the hull, one to spec and one as built. Install the shaft and P bracket, fix the shaft at the inboard end and apply the load to the prop end. No doubt a clever chap like JD could carry out calculations that are more realistic than the half hearted attempts reported in the judgement which only looked at forces on impact.
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I suspect it would be a lot easier and probably more credible to computer model the grounding scenarios using finite element analysis.
 
petem said:
Whilst I agree that if Pearl had hired some decent lawyers they might have got away with this but from a moral perspective they were building potentially dangerous boats and they paid the price for this. (JFM, perhaps it's a good thing that you weren't defending them!)

I wonder if this action may lead to a string of claims against Pearl? If I owned one I'd be having it surveyed immediately so I could be at the front of the queue of owners demanding that their vessels are made safe.

Does anyone know what Pearl are going to do to check the other boats they have built (assuming they haven't done this already)? The decent thing would be to check them all for hull thickness. In fact, they should have done this as soon as they learned of the potential issue. I also note that there's no mention of this incident on their website. If they were confident of their product surely they would make a statement to reassure current and potential owners? Perhaps they think this will blow over.
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Quite a few boat builder have gone into voluntary liquidation rather that face these sort of claims
 
Tranona said:
However, it does not seem that the P bracket took the impact. The initial grounding was the prop hitting the rock and much of the force was absorbed by the shaft bending 15 degrees ... [snip]
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I refer you back to post 126. If the prop hit the rock and the prop was still connected to the shaft which was retained within the P bracket, then the P bracket would have experienced the same force. That is how forces work - they are transferred within/between rigid structures that are connected. The only circumstance in which this wouldn't be true is if the prop/shaft/bracket were not rigid, but they are. (The shaft bent a lot, but it is still considered "rigid". Try doing calculations for the amount of energy absorbed by the bent prop shaft and you will find it is an insignificant proportion of the total kinetic energy of a 30 tonne boat doing 6 kts).

It is valid to say (and I acknowledged earlier) that much of the force experienced by the prop/shaft/bracket - initially at least - would have been horizontal and not vertical.
 
jfm said:
Angele, it was 400 not 40 kilo newtons. (I've contributed to this because I typoishly said 40 in some of my posts above, sorry!)
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No it wasn't, it was 40kN.

and that this compared with a figure of 40.5 kN for the as-designed laminate
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I stick with my earlier comments that the force needed to stop a 30 tonne boat quickly is likely to be way more than 40.5kN - you just have to hope that this is spread across large sections of the hull (such as the boat riding up over a rock) and not taken by a single (weak) point on impact, or the boat will surely sink.
 
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