[Chris Burkard]

If you read your survey, it likely has an errors and omission clause. It won't prevent you from suing, but as Yolo mentioned, it will make it hard to win. Obviously it would be very hard for a surveyor to find every single issue on a vessel with thousands of individual parts in just a few hours. Bent motor mounts should have shown up in the form of vibration during the trail run or the prop tip run-out when the running gear was checked during the haul-out. Did you have both a hull surveyor and an engine surveyor?

The other area of recourse may be with the seller. Something like a hard grounding where major repairs of the hull and strut where made should be disclosed at the time of sale. As a licensed yacht broker in Florida we are required to disclose any issues that may materially affect the vessels value such as grounding repairs, lightning strikes, impacts with other vessels, pilings or docks, sinking (complete or partial). Now, if an owner fails to disclose this information to the broker, there is no way to pass on information you don't have, but the owner may have some liability for not disclosing it depending on the severity of the repairs. If there was no structural damage, and it was just a bent prop, shaft and motor mounts and they replaced the prop and shaft and had the engines aligned, they may not need to disclose it as it really doesn't affect the material value of the vessel. Basically you could just replace the motor mounts and be good as new. It all depends on the damage and repairs made.

Let us know how it works out.

As far as the bent engine mounts, what are the vibration levels at cruising speed? Any strange noises or weird harmonics? I agree it would take a lot of jarring force to bend the motor mounts.