when does a sailboat need a gelcoat?
This subject has haunted me since I bought this sailboat, what is gelcoat and when does my sailboat need it? Here’s the answers …
But before I begin I HAVE to say that the most important part of repainting your sailboat is the preparation! Be ready to sand and tape your tail-end off. I started out trying to cut a few corners here and am now paying the price in repainting areas and additional sanding.
And don’t decide to do other projects on the boat while someone is painting the outside! It will take a couple days for the gelcoat to completely harden, and even though I left the non-skid areas unpainted there were a lot of dings in the paint from their shoes. Yeah, I had an electrician looking at a problem and my nephew helping me fix the sink drain all at the same time I was paying a contractor to spray on my gelcoat … learn from my mistakes here!
Gelcoat simply said is paint, not any kind of paint though. This stuff will preserve and protect your boat, you can have it tinted with color, although it is typically used as the standard white. The properties of this paint harden to make a solid sheild over any area you paint with it, but understand that like any paint it breaks down over time and needs to be replaced. The picture to the right shows my boat with just the gelcoat having been sprayed on.
I hired someone with experience to mix and spray on the gelcoat this first time, all I’ve heard was horror stories about doing this wrong. After seeing it done I believe I could do this, the hardest part is timing. MAKE SURE you have all your masking done BEFORE you mix the paint. You have to combine a hardner and resin with the gelcoat to make the liguid harden in to the protective shield. And that hardner does just that, you have a limited amount of time to transfer that paint mixture on to the boat before you have a canister of expensive goop!
I could tell it was time to gelcoat because the existing surface had a fair amount of small stress fractures, the prior owners had started patching areas on the boat that left tacky looking brown lines, and the non-skid areas are badly sunburned letting me know the boat had not had proper upkeep.
As you can see I did not gelcoat over the non-skid areas, the reason for this is gelcoat is thick and I did not want to risk filling in the textured areas too much knowing I still need to paint over them with a non-skid paint (which you can see I’ve started in the cockpit in this picture). It also made applying the gelcoat easier since I did not need to tape off every section of non-skid, we allowed for the overspray to make the handpainting of the non-skid topcoat to match right up to the lines of the gelcoat easy.
I am using Rust-O-Leum brand boat top coat for my non-skid areas and adding in a anti-skid additive to give these areas additional texture. You can get this at Lowe’s and in many different colors, I chose the biege because I liked the original beige that was on the boat.
Another couple hours of painting and the outside of this boat will be in fantastic shape again, moving on to replacing the grab handles, sail cover and porthole windows.
