The YouTube videos were all over Facebook and Twitter in December 2014, when the bridge at Broad Causeway in South Florida dropped onto the arch and superstructure of the 161-foot Trinity Rockstar. News copters captured video from multiple angles overhead, showing the yacht trapped like a porpoise in a net.
At the time, Rockstar was known as a luxury charter yacht with a base rate of nearly a quarter-million dollars per week. From that day on, though, she became known as the yacht that had a bridge fall on her. Hard.
Fast forward a few months, and Rockstar is now for sale on the brokerage market. International Yacht Collection recently announced a $1 million reduction in her asking price, which is $18.9 million. Her top sections have been repaired at Lauderdale Marine Center in Florida, including aluminum work on the radar arch, fairing and painting, and teak-decking work.
For prospective buyers, the highly publicized damage to a yacht like Rockstar can be off-putting, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong with the boat today, says Allen J. Dannewitz, an accredited marine surveyor and owner of Professional Marine Services in Boynton Beach, Florida.
“I’ve seen a lot of big repairs over the years, and if they’re done by the right people, you’d never know,” Dannewitz says. “They’ll never be a problem again in the future.”
Large structural repairs like the ones Rockstar needed are far less common aboard boats than the smaller issues surveyors regularly see, he says. Things like damaged props or dents and dings come with the territory on boats that have seen a few years or more on the water.
For a survey of a yacht with known damage on the scale of Rockstar’s, Dannewitz says, he would approach the traditional survey differently. He would still perform due diligence in all areas, but he also would look specifically to the damaged sections to ensure that repairs had been properly completed, in a way that nobody could tell there had ever been a problem.
In addition, he says, he might contact the shipyard that did the work and, if the prospective buyer requested it, the shipyard that originally built the boat. Taking those extra steps might add two or three days to the survey process, but they would ensure that the buyer has every bit of information available.
“I would certainly want to see the records,” Dannewitz says. “It would make a difference in my fee, but I would check it out as thoroughly as they wanted me to: what was done, what was replaced and make sure the job is structurally sound and it’s cosmetically such that you can’t tell.”
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