Haul Out and Blister Blues

Time for the first haul out. After arranging for a haul out with the yard, we brought the boat over with the dinghy tied alongside, since the motor had been removed by me earlier. As soon as the boat came out it became apparent that the boat has a serious blister problem...the dreaded boat pox.

 After doing tons of reading, research, and internet searching, I at first decided I really didn't want to remove the entire gelcoat since I was worried about how much work re-fairing the hull would entail. So I decided to first grind out all the blisters, then remove all the bottom paint. Large areas of bottom paint were already flaking and chipping off, suggesting poor adhesion of the first coat during a previous bottom job. The paint removal was an absolutely horrible job. First I tried sanding it off, but the toxic dust was horrible and it was way too slow. I didn't want to use a heavier grit grinder because I was worried about gouging too much of the gelcoat.

Ultimately, I used a cabinet scraper, assisted by some heavy duty paint remover, to hand scape the whole boat free of paint, one 2 inch strip at a time. I could barely raise my arms above my head for a few days after that. Had I only known.....

These pics show just how many blisters I had. Most of them were only into the first mat layer under the gelcoat, so thankfully I don't believe I have a serious delamination issue.

Blister everywhere! Of course, once I had stripped the paint and ground out the thousands of blisters, doubt set in. How wet is the laminate? should I dry the whole boat and barrier coat the bottom? Will the boat dry without stripping the gelcoat? How many liquid filled blisters remained under the gelcoat unseen?

Finally, with much agonizing, I decided to just strip the whole damn thing and do it the right way. The bummer is, had I known I would take the gelcoat down originally, I wouldn't have wasted a month scraping paint and grinding out blisters, not to mention all the scraping exhaustion!

Gelcoat stripped using a right angle grinder with a 7" 24 grit disk. Took about 10 hrs to do the whole thing, mostly because my arms started giving out on day 2, so I took lots of breaks. Once removed, hundreds, maybe thousands, more dime to nickle sized "voids", areas where the mat didn't wet out completely, were obvious. These would have been blisters waiting to happen.

So now the plan is to completely dry the hull, fair, and barrier coat with epoxy. Lots of work ahead of me.