Return Of A Legend

Bertram Is Back With a Powerful, Seamlessly Built 35-footer That’s as Pretty as the Sportfishing Exemplar That Inspired Her, the Iconic Bertram 31.

- Capt. Bill Pike

There she was, berthed in the haulout slip at Bertram’s Tampa facility—the new Bertram 35. A bunch of guys were gathered around, some on board, feverishly finishing a washdown; some on a nearby floating dock, burnishing her “Aristo Blue” Awlcraft paint job; and some standing farther off, clearly admiring an assortment of styling elements and architectural details that obviously owed a great deal to the old, super-popular Bertram 31 but, just as obviously, went many nautical miles beyond her.

My sea trial of the 35 had been a long time coming. I’d first laid eyes on the boat in early May of last year, during a press event at Lyman-Morse in Thomaston, Maine. She’d been only semi-finished then, little more than a collection of disembodied components produced by Lyman and laid out for our inspection, awaiting a truck ride south to Tampa, where a passel of Bertram employees would finish the assembly and crank up a production line for all subsequent iterations.

One aspect in particular stood out. While the renderings of the 35 the Bertram folks were passing around showed a finished product that seemed elegantly and classically simple, especially in terms of her profile, the complexity of the fiberglass work necessary to produce this impression was, from what I could see, extreme.

The flybridge illustrated the point best. At first glance it appeared to be a smooth, one-piece, curvaceous construct, but upon closer inspection I saw that it was actually an amalgam of five separate, through-bolted, fiberglass-bonded parts, each finely tooled and crafted to fit unobtrusively and seamlessly into the whole.