The Triton Bottom Paint Death March, Part II

Ten days of pain(t), and no one has died.  Yet.

The saga continues, and like POWs in the war on copper paint, we trudge along on our own private death march. . . 

Triton's nearly sanded bottom.  Almost all of the old blue paint has been
removed, and carefully reapplied to our hair, our clothes, the pores of
our skin, and any previously clean, horizontal surfaces on the boat. 

There is an old saying that "when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is easy to forget that your original intention was to drain the swamp".   There is an analogous maritime saying, older even than the one about the alligators, almost as old as boats themselves, that goes "Maybe we should pay someone to do this job?"

I believe this saying was invented approximately two years after the first bottom paint was ever applied to a vessel, and was first uttered exactly seven hours and forty-five minutes into the first day of the bottom job, when the boatwright suddenly realized he was going to have to keep doing this again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and quite possibly the day after, and maybe even longer than that.

AnnMarie wearing her "sailor's burka"

We've got the boat down to mostly bare gelcoat, cleaned up the fiberglass and put on the epoxy barrier coat, but this was no mean feat!  Taking the paint off of a boat this size is a daunting job, especially the areas around the rudder and propeller shafts, and any other areas that have sharp, concave surfaces or tight corners, seams or or edges.   We've run out of the chemical stripper, which we had been using to great effect, but was expensive.  If we had to do it all over again, we would have bought three times as much, and used a pressure washer to boot!
[editor's note: It goes without saying that if you take a job like this on, make sure you have an adequate supply of chemical stripper on hand before you start.  But the real important object lesson here is that if you do happen to run out, DO NOT hand a few hundred dollars in cash to your friend and ask him to "just pop out and bring back some stripper".  Be very clear that you want C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L stripper.  The other kind will not remove any paint, no matter how much additional money you offer her.]

The green gunk is the chemical stripper at work.  Definitely made our
job much easier, and if we had more of it, we would have used it.  We
couldn't get the other stripper to do anything except pout.

 Don't get us wrong, the chemical stripper wasn't a picnic either.  It required scraping the layers of paint off, without gouging the gelcoat.  That isn't nearly as easy as it sounds, and working overhead is a difficult, unpleasant job under the best of circumstances, like when you are being paid hourly, but it is not ever fun.  When we ran out of chemical stripper, life went from bleak to black, or at least dark blue and dusty.  We are now back to using, as they've come to be known by us, "those fucking grinders"*.

[editor's note: "those fucking grinders" is a registered trademark of SatansMaritimeHell.com, and is used with permission.  Their motto "Tempting human souls is hard work; take the easy way out with those fucking grinders!  Guaranteed to wreak havoc on the most saintly of souls.  Over 1 million evil acts committed."]

We were originally (back before the tingling and numbness set in) calling them "Sea Flowbies" or "R2D2's Retarded Cousin", both of which sounded cute but didn't really convey the sense of dread we eventually developed towards them.  Sort of like referring to a case of Bubonic plague as "A pocket full of posies".   These really are god-awful machines.  They are a silly solution to environmental concerns (especially frustrating because it seems the newer paints are significantly less toxic and wouldn't require such stringent regulations), and as grinders go, they are about as effective as the rhythm method.  In fact, if the Pope ever had to grind the Pope Mobile back down to the Kevlar gelcoat, especially if he had to do it wearing a respirator over his zucchetoo, he probably would have been far more understanding about cursing, losing faith in God, and taking the pill.

Please, God, make it stop.

The hull approaching whiteness.

Where was I?   Oh, yeah, those fucking grinders.  We really do hate them.  We hate everything about them.  But mostly, we hate the sandpaper disks that don't stick to the Velcro backing pads and we hate the way said disks fly off just when you start to make any progress.   We now have a stack, six inches tall, of used sanding disks.  Well, actually, it would be six inches tall if you went around the boat picking them all up off the ground and stacking them neatly on top of each other.   What we have now is more like an area-rug's worth.  We have also blown through a few more tubes of the non-Velcro backed adhesive, which is the only solution we've come up with that will keep the sanding disks on the grinder backing pads.

The adhesive is basically the crystal meth of grinding.  Once you start using it, you can't stop.  This isn't normal, BTW.  You aren't supposed to ever use this adhesive on a Velcro backed grinding pad.  You only ever put this stuff on when the grinder backing pad's little Velcro hooks have completely failed.  Which seems to happen about twenty nanoseconds after you start using them.

At some point during the week, one  of the grinder pads physically broke off, and the good folks at Napa Valley had to replace the head.  The brand new backing pad worked for about two days, then disks started flying off of it.  Did I mention that I hate those fucking grinders?

Tiny pock marks, probably
from the original mold.

Onward we ground.  We needed to get most all of the paint off, so that we could apply a couple of coats of epoxy barrier coat.   "Why?", you ask.  Well, because it is supposed to make the boat that much more impervious to boat blisters.   The claim is that blisters form for a number of reasons, but a key one is the desire of moisture to migrate through the fiberglass.  Create a completely moisture-proof barrier, so the argument goes, and you reduce the likelihood that you'll get blisters.

I think that this may be the moral equivalent of those little plastic protector tabs for the heels of your shoes; the ones they used to try to sell you in the '80s, but instead of putting them on your shoes, this is more like having them stapled directly to your feet.

Applying penetrating epoxy.

But still we grind on.  We grind until we can only see the whites of their eyes.  Or, to be more precise, the whites of the gelcoat.  That means making sure everything is pretty much white, and that any gouges caused from those fucking grinders, or any blemishes, dents, or other pock marks, must be filled in with epoxy and faired.    Much to our surprise, the hull wasn't in bad shape at all, although we did find a few spots where there were very tiny pockets, but our hero Kelly (the fiberglass repair expert at Napa Valley Marina) assures us that this was probably a minor defect created when they sprayed the mold during construction.   We've gone through and painted all of these areas with Smith's penetrating epoxy, which is a very watery two part epoxy that gets into cracks and crevices and creates a better surface for the epoxy filler to bond.  Then, we filled in any holes or divots we found with an epoxy putty, and ground the hull back fair again.

Before fairing back the epoxy.

We got extremely lucky with our weather window. It was stifling hot the week before we arrived, and it rained the entire week after we finished, which was lucky for us, it also made working a bit easier.   If you are going to try to do something like this, it is best if you can arrange for it to happen when the weather is warm, dry and still.   If you figure out how to arrange the weather, please let me know.

One interesting discovery we made while doing this is that the leading edges of both hulls were covered in a reddish-brown type of bondo.  At first I thought that perhaps this indicated some sort of earlier grounding and repair job, but Kelly seemed to think that this is typical of how these boats are constructed.  We also found the same bondo technique around the area where the drive shaft log attached, as well as around the rudder base, which is pretty much every connecting seam of the hull, on both sides of the boat.  I'm not sure what to make of it, if you have any similar experience or insight, please drop me a line.

The hull just before we painted the barrier coat.

Once we completely finished sanding the hull (including patching the no longer used thru-hulls), and had everything nice and smooth, we needed to wipe all the surfaces down in acetone, to remove the dust that was statically clinging to the hull surfaces.  This is one of those steps that doesn't seem like it should make that big a difference, but it does.  No matter how good a job you do at cleaning up the hull (we had wiped it down once already), the acetone will still pick up more gunk and dust, so be prepared to go through a lot of clean white linen rags.   The advice we got was to use it liberally, while wearing gloves and a respirator, and make sure you don't miss any spots.   Expect to go through about 2 gallons of acetone as well on this project.

Our hero, John, was instrumental in making this
project possible.  Without his and JD's efforts, we
 don't think we could have survived, much less
finished the death march.  We'd probably still be
working on it.

What frustrated us most about this whole ordeal was how long it took to get the old paint removed, and conversely, how quickly the new paint went on.   The epoxy barrier coat had to be mixed together and thoroughly stirred, then allowed to sit for an hour or so before we could apply it.   If you do this yourself, make sure you read all the directions on the can before beginning, as there are some pretty non-intuitive steps, with some very badly translated phrases from the original Middle English.

Once mixed together, you'll have a couple of hours before it completely hardens, so work quickly but don't rush.   The paint comes in at least two shades of grey; we used three gallons of each color.  If you are putting two coats on, you'll want the under coat to be a lighter color than the top coat, otherwise you'll forget where you've painted already.   We're pretty sure there are some spots that four or five coats because we just couldn't remember, or were told "Oh, I just painted that area" by someone else.   You probably won't get everything done in just one go and knowing where you were when putting on the second coat is crucial.

Our other hero, JD was a rock star!! An Amazon of a woman
 who worked hard and did yeoman-like work to boot!

You'll also want to have a reasonable schedule as to when you apply it.  The first barrier coat needs at least 12 hours to cure, so plan on putting it on in the early afternoon and allowing it to dry completely, overnight.  Put the next coat on the following morning (providing it is warm and dry out) and then apply the bottom paint later that evening.  You should be able to then slap on at least one or two more layers of bottom paint before you need to put the boat back in the water.

The bows in preparation for the the blue stripes.

We did something a bit more creative.  In all my readings, one theme I've come across often is that when catamarans get into trouble, they sometimes will flip upside down and become quite stable and difficult to sink.   This has been the case with numerous high profile disasters lately, and being that it can be difficult to spot a dark blue hull floating in the ocean, a number of catamaran owners have taken to painting their hulls in bright colors.  In fact, our friends, Laureen & Jason decided to paint their catamaran's entire hull Emergency Orange, although I'm not sure if that was their reasoning.  Nonetheless, it gave me the idea that we could paint the keel and rudder orange, in case we were ever floating upside down in the ocean and the Coast Guard was having trouble spotting us.    This kind of reasoning is why AnnMarie forbids me from picking out my own clothes.

This was our first attempt at painting the keels orange.  The
white is the caulking we used between the keel & hull.

So we started hunting around looking for orange bottom paint.  Napa Valley has a "corkage" fee that they charge on any paint you use if you don't buy it through them.  While I personally find this a bit unfair, it is their business, and they deserve to make the markup instead of West Marine.  Okay, so we ordered the paint through them, but we made one fatal mistake.  We asked Kirby how much paint he thought we'd need.  His answer was, like many other things we'd asked him, wrong.  Completely wrong.  And like most everything else he was involved in (see Napa Valley Marina), it would also end up costing us more time & money than we'd originally planned for, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Village People song "In The Navy" now makes a lot more sense

We asked the marina, as per Kirby's recommendation, that they order 5 gallons of the red Micron CSC bottom paint from Interlux for the hulls.  For the keels, as per Kirby's recommendation,  we ordered two pints of Petit Vivid, one pint in red, one in yellow.  His thinking was that we would mix them together to get orange.   As it turns out, if you start adding red paint to yellow, you only need about one quarter as much red to make a very vibrant orange.   Adding any more makes it too dark and you get a kind of blood orange red.   So we managed to get a little less than one coat of paint on the keels before we ran out of paint.   And, because this all happened at the tail end of our death march, on a Sunday, when we were supposed to be put back in the water the following morning, we were stuck and pressed for time.

Pink rudders and keel.
Don't ask, don't tell.

There weren't any stores open on a Sunday that sold any kind of bottom paint, much less in yellow or orange, but we managed to find a friend with an almost entirely unused gallon of white by the same manufacturer.   We were desperate, exhausted, and so bleary from those fucking grinders that we would have used goats blood if they bled yellow, but the white seemed like it might work.   We tried mixing the remaining bit of orange paint into it.  Interestingly, one third a pint of orange paint mixed with three fourths of a gallon of white paint makes a bit less than one gallon of peach colored bottom paint.  Peach.  And it was a retching shade of peach at that.

We still had about three fourths of a pint of red, so figuring "in for a penny, in for a pound", we mixed that in as well.  We now had a gallon of bright pink bottom paint.  Pink.  Not purple, not rose, not even lavender . . . but pink.  Bright pink.  The kind of pink that liltingly asks, "Hi Sailor, new in town?".  Fortunately, the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy has been discontinued, so we might just have improved our chances of getting rescued at sea.   [editor's note:  To all rescue personnel:  if you see us clinging to a bright pink keel, please remember that we are grateful for your assistance, don't care what your orientation is, and that you look fabulous in that uniform!]  

AnnMarie poses next to her stripes.

Choose a bottom paint color that goes
well with your complexion.

On the bright (pink) side, the hull painting went pretty quickly, except for the boot stripes (those dark blue stripes that run between the white hull and the bottom paint), a job we'd given to AnnMarie because it required skill, patience, and a fanatical attention to detail, which seemed right up her alley.  What we didn't count on was that the warm summer evening also meant lots of mosquitoes, and that the shop lights we used to illuminate the hull would attractive the little buggers.  Once they got close, the smell of the blue LPU paint seemed irresistible to them, and they landed by the dozens on her beautiful handiwork, and then stuck like bugs on fly paper.   I think she started to cry at that point.  The next morning she had to sand off the mosquitoes and repaint.  It seems she always ends up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop on these boat projects.

John was about twice as fast with a
paint brush as any mere mortal.

  Even though we had great weather through all of it, and even though John & JD both worked weekends and through the week with us [without their help we'd probably still be in the yard!], it was a close call being ready in time, and we ended up being delayed until Tuesday, thanks in part to the mosquito debacle.   Fortunately, the folks waiting in line to haul out changed their plans and needed to delay a couple of days, so it worked out alright for us, although I don't think the yard was happy that we took as long as we did.  We still had to finish about a dozen other projects, so it gave us another day to throw some additional paint on the boat and finish up a bit more.

Once you get enough paint back on the boat, you are ready to "splash down", as they say.  This isn't nearly as exciting as it seems, unless you've forgotten to close a thru-hull valve.   They will lower you back into the water very slowly, and it is a very good idea to have folks checking every single valve, thru-hull, stopcock, or flange (whether you've repaired them or not) in case there are any leaks.  Don't let anyone rush you during this phase.  If you have a problem, you'll want to find out before you float off the lift.  It is much easier to be quickly pulled back out than to have to plug a leak.

Fortunately for us, we didn't have any (they developed much later on) but it is a wise policy to spend a few hours checking through the boat.  We spent the night at the dock and didn't leave until the next morning, when we were quite certain that we weren't taking on water.   Work done by the yard is usually guaranteed, but DIY repairs aren't, so be absolutely certain that you did the job correctly.

As it turned out, we were unsatisfied with the way the one inch diameter (unflanged) valves were installed (see our blog entry titled
Thru-hull Flange Plate and Marelon Flanged Valve Installation), and we ended up going back to the yard a few months later, hauling out again, and replacing them with a better solution.

The Triton Bottom Paint Death March

How we redid our catamaran's bottom paint,

added an epoxy barrier coat,

pushed ourselves beyond exhaustion,

and abused all our friends.

Friends help you move.   - Abraham Lincoln.
Good friends help you move the body.   - Al Capone.
Great friends help you paint your boat.   - Robb Triton.

Triton up on blocks in Trinidad, when we first bought her.
You can see that I'd just finished putting a layer of red paint
over what turned out to be several layers of blue bottom.

Is your life a bit too interesting?  Or perhaps you just have too many friends and/or too much money?  Maybe you're getting too much sleep and looking for a way to run yourself down a bit?  Well look no further folks, we've got a solution to all that's plaguing you!!

First, buy a catamaran, preferably a large one, that needs new bottom paint.  Do make sure that there are at least seven or eight layers of old paint already on there, so that you'll eventually need to grind it all off before you can put the new paint back on.  Then, move your boat to California, where the environmental protection laws require you to use absurdly inefficient and costly mechanisms that require enormous physical effort and a vast work force to achieve your goal.   Oh, and while you are at it, decide at the last moment that what you really want to do is grind all the bottom paint completely off, right down to the gelcoat, so that you can add a couple of coats of two-part epoxy barrier paint before re-painting your boat. 

Triton with her original blue bottom paint- we'd already
easily scraped off all the red paint I had put on in Trinidad,
leading us to a false sense of security.

That is how we spent our summer vacation.  And we also wanted to rid ourselves of any unwanted cash, sleep or friends.  What better way to achieve all these goals than to ask everyone we knew to come help us work on Triton, our 45' catamaran?   Now I should point out that when we bought the boat, we knew it had several layers of bottom paint already (six to be precise, all in blue) and I'd quickly thrown on a couple of coats of red on in Trinidad (before we sailed her back to S.F., back in 2007) so we knew all that would eventually have to come off, but we had no idea how grueling a task it would turn out to be.  [editor's note:  It is no coincidence that the first four letters in the word paint are pain.]

The actor Edward Kean, on his death bed, is claimed to have said "dying is easy . . . comedy is hard".   Well, the sailing equivalent of that would be "painting is easy, grinding is hard".   When they say "Ignorance Is Bliss", they are talking about folks who've only ever put paint on, but never removed it.

I think I spent all of three days, in the hot tropic sun of Trinidad, to slap two layers of bottom paint on Triton, and I was by myself.  I thought "Taking it off shouldn't be much worse.  How hard could this be?"  I think you'll find that question running through many of my blog entries.  Usually followed by a heart-wrenching tale of woe.

Mike has never fully recovered from the ordeal
of painting his own boat.  He still twitches when
ever anyone mentions it.

Did I mention that the boat in question is a 45' catamaran?  I bring up the length not to brag, but only because that is, by most sailor's standards, a very large boat!  I also point out that it is a catamaran (not one, but two hulls!) because, when you have to first scrape off said paint, it really means it's far more than twice as big as that.  It is more like 100,000 times as big!!  At least it feels that way.

My dear friend Mikey [one of the original Triton crew] scraped and painted the bottom of his 21' monohull over the course of about a week at the same marina.  He had half a dozen friends helping him, and was exhausted by the end.  We foolishly ignored his experience and thought we would have no problem.  We expected to have at least three times as many (and maybe more) show up to help, so we were confident we could kick this job out in no time.  Perhaps coincidentally, Mikey was busy that week, which should have clued us in. [editor's note: in the end it turned out that over twenty-five people came to our assistance, all of them worked tirelessly, and some of them are still speaking to us.]

Our loyal, supportive friends.
We are not worthy.

But like all doomed projects, somewhere along the line you convince yourself of something that is just patently false-- like filling a zeppelin with highly explosive hydrogen gas is a good idea for commercial air travel, or that launching a space shuttle with frozen O-rings is a reasonable safety precaution, or that you can remove a 1/8" thick sheet of copper infused paint from 700 square feet of boat in less than a man-year.  All of these ideas end in fireballs, and usually none of the crew survives.

Jen after just two hours of grinding.
It got worse.

So, we needed to put paint on our catamaran.  We knew that was going to be a big job, but we figured we'd be able to depend on our vast network of friends to help us, which we hoped might reduce the cost a bit by "doing it yourself".  We had a large assortment of friends who've been there for us in the past, and we were confident that we could pull this off.  Little did we know that the net savings would be offset by the increased health risks of sleep deprivation, penury through boat-yard micro-purchases [i.e. being nickle and dime'd to death] and the negative health effects of breathing toxic paint dust.

Triton up on the hard, we established a base camp over to the right with a
  shade awning and a cooler full of cool and  refreshing drinks, and snacks.
  Plus lots of camp chairs!  This is quite possibly the only reason the crew
  didn't mutiny.  If you are going  to enlist your friends, make sure they are
 well fed, better hydrated, and have a comfortable  place to sit in the shade.

But our first task was finding a marina that could haul us, somewhere within sailing distance of Emeryville. After much searching, we eventually brought our boat to the Napa Valley Marina, just up the Napa River, in beautiful Napa, CA. They are (as best we could determine) the only non-industrial boat yard  in the bay area capable of hauling our boat. At just under 25' wide, there just aren't that many boat yards that can handle us on the west coast. . . that don't require a trip to L.A. or San Diego.  There were  some real headaches in arranging a date to make this happen [see our post titled Napa Valley Marina] but we eventually managed to arrange a date in July and sailed up there the day before.

There is nothing so much fun as
messing around in boats.

To haul large catamarans the marina uses a rail car with a superstructure welded on top, that's it in the picture to the left and above, with Triton hanging from it.  They lower it down (on  railroad tracks) into the water and float the boat over, then pull the rail car (and the boat) up and out of the water by means of a massive winch and cable system. That means that the boat is dangling ten feet up in the air, but it also means both hulls are completely exposed and it was easy to get to anything that needed work, provided you are willing to stand on a wooden plank suspended between two stands that had all the rigidity of President Bush's stance on new taxes.

John ate more dust than
Wile. E. Coyote

Once we were up out of the water, we thought removing the old paint from the hulls would be quite easy, as both "amas" (the hull-shaped parts of the boat) are suspended in mid-air.  Impressive if you've never seen it done before.  As with most things that are referred to as "she", nothing is easy.

How Blue Beard got his name.

If you are anticipating doing this kind of job yourself, I'd suggest two things.  First, think hard about adding an epoxy barrier coat (or three) to your hull if it doesn't already have it (this will help prevent boat blisters), and second, pay someone else to take the old paint off.  It is a horrible job and I'm glad I'll never have to do anything like that again in my life.   To say that this was a rough job is an understatement.  It is a horrible job, and you will hate every minute of it after about the third day.   There is a reason why child labor laws were enacted, and I think a large part of it is because many boaters have children.  I know that if I had any kids, I'd have made them scrape paint until their beards grew in, even the girls. [editor's note: The above is an understatement.  Did I say third day?  AnnMarie insists it only took three hours.]

Are we having fun yet?

And to make matters worse, the state of California has decided that scraping off paint is a threat to marine wildlife, and therefore you can only do so in a controlled fashion.  The controlled fashion is a grinding wheel attached to a vacuum cleaner.  Think R2D2's retarded cousin, but with a mean streak.   These things are loud, heavy, cumbersome and sprayed copper sulfate dust everywhere.  If you weren't careful, some even ended up inside the vacuum cleaner itself.  I always wondered what you got if a jack hammer mated with a bench grinder, whose mother was an industrial Hoover.

Oh sure, it looks cute and friendly, but this little beast is pure
 demon spawn from hell.  You have to use special sandpaper
 with a Velcro backing, except that half the grinders we got 
 didn't hold the sandpaper.  In the end we just glued them on.  

Using these devices was one of the most frustrating things any of us had ever done.  You would finally get into a groove with the grinder, and start actually taking paint off, when the disk would tear itself off the backing plate and fly away. That meant you're having to climb down the ladder, go find the disk (it was usually under the cradle in some difficult to reach place) and then you had to glue it back on again, which took several minutes.  But we're not bitter.

Believe it or not, there is a beautiful, sexy
woman underneath all those bandages. I just
don't know why she is still living with me.

And because there is dust flying everywhere, you need to wear enough protective clothing to operate an asbestos mine.  This is neither comfortable, nor attractive, unless you were going for that Claude Rains look.  Not wearing the gear meant you were, after a few minutes of grinding, completely covered in a brightly colored toxic dust.  Looking at this as a Libertarian, who believes you should have the right of self determination and responsibility for one's choices, I got to choose between death from sun stroke, or lung failure.

A very blue Chuck.

Or perhaps nerve failure.  Holding the grinder for any length of time, in any position, was exhausting, but especially if you were working overhead.  The constant vibration eventually gets to you and we all began to experience a certain amount of tingling and numbness in our hands.  Our friend Fracas developed a technique where he suspended the grinder from a bungee cord, which helped relieve some of the strain, but I think OSHA would take a dim view of operating heavy machinery at the end of an elastic band.

As the days wore on, the symptoms would occur sooner and sooner.  This is not a good sign.  We were not having fun, and it probably meant we were causing permanent nerve damage.  There is nothing about this in the glossy ads for boat ownership, and you never hear about this from the yacht salesman.  AnnMarie mentioned this fact repeatedly.

Kids don't try this at home!  Operating
a grinder attached to a sling shot isn't
 for the faint of heart.

We came to despise the grinders.  Not only did we hate using the Marine version of the Flowbie (as we not-so-affectionately called it) but they were expensive too!  We had to rent them from the yard -you can't use your own or we'd have bought several, then returned them for more industrial ones, then returned those and asked if they had anything bigger and faster, perhaps those machines they use to remove asphalt from the road?  Plus there weren't enough to go around.  We wanted to rent at least four, and we were lucky if, on any given day, we could get three working units, which is another story entirely. [see Napa Valley Marina post]

Barb the wonder bunny!

And to add salt to the wound, the Velcro backing on the grinder head was worn off, so that the sandpaper disks wouldn't stick and we needed to use glue to keep them on.  We went through four tubes of the glue intended for the non-Velcro style disks, and had a stack of used disks six inches high when we were done.

Also, the disks themselves were very expense.  If you are foolish enough to do this job yourself, be advised that it is far cheaper to buy the sanding disks in bulk somewhere other than the marina, as you are going to use an English-Standard-Intercourse-Tonne of the them.  [editor's note: English-Standard-Intercourse-Tonne is the registered trademark of Her Imperial Majesty and may not be used without permission, especially if you are part of the EU, which uses the metric version.]

J.D. is our hero.  She worked harder than guys
twice her size, and still rocked the place.  I'm
amazed more people didn't fall off scaffolds
for not watching what they were doing.

Now, to be fair, we screwed up.  What we should have done was just paid the yard to do the work.  They probably would have done a better job, faster, and for about the same amount of money in the long run, when you consider what it cost us for the months of therapy afterwards.   AnnMarie still twitches whenever she hears a vacuum cleaner start up.  And we really didn't factor in the cost of materials - you'll want to have at least one respirator per active helper, plus goggles, ear muffs, gloves, head covering, coveralls, bunny suits, etc. for everyone working on the project, or standing within 100 yards of it.

That this woman is still
speaking to me is amazing.

Plus, you'll look a right bork wearing all the gear.  Now, to be fair, some folks can still pull off this look (JD managed it quite well) but your average friend is going to be hot, uncomfortable and relatively unproductive after about four hours.  And you'll spend a significant amount of your own time just keeping the project moving forward.  There will be constant problems, your friends will not understand simple instructions (like "Please don't sand a hole through my boat") and wil tend to make gouges in the fiberglass if they aren't careful.

All that will take away from your ability to get anything accomplished yourself.  Being a foreman is a full time job, which means you won't get any actual work done, and you'll be hard pressed not to want to start yelling at people who are only trying to help.  Yet another reason to let the pros at Napa Valley do the work.  They know how, and won't make costly mistakes, like promising your better third you'd take her out for a nice dinner, and then falling asleep in front of all your friends instead.  This is not the best way to endear yourself to the love of your life, especially if she has just spent the day being miserable on your behalf.

Chuck & Susie chat with Fracas while I snore through my
promise of a hard-earned dinner for AnnMarie.

John Roller - one of the many saviours
 of our project!  We would still be
 grinding if it wasn't for his help.

In retrospect, we now realize that part of the problem was how much progress we made the first day.  The first two layers of red paint (the stuff I had put on in Trinidad) came off so quickly that it made us think the job would go much faster than it did.  We'd had lots of folks show up that first weekend, and were running the grinders continuously, with four or five people rotating through a given machine, so that they were never sitting idle.  The boat had been red on the bottom when we hauled it out, and after two days, it was mostly blue, so it looked like we were zipping alone and would be done in no time, but what we really did was the easy part.

Unfortunately, the remaining bottom paint was six layers thick, and baked on.  I think the space shuttle tiles would be easier to get off.  It was twice as hard to grind, and three times as thick.  And there were less of us.  Most of our friends had left, and only the few, the proud, the marine lunatics remained.  While we are very, very grateful to everyone who helped, it was ultimately the folks who showed up day after day that made this task possible.  We can't thank them enough!   JD, John, Felix, Terri, Ed & Diana all came back over and over again to help, and that made a huge difference for our moral.

Joe & John beat back the blues.

We persevered on, ignoring the enormity of the job, despite the warnings of John [crew on the leg from Cabo to San Diego trip], a professional painting contractor, who (politely but firmly) suggested we try a chemical stripper.  We started out by buying a gallon of the stuff, which seemed to work well.  We then got a 5 gallon bucket of the stuff, and wished we had done so right from the start.

You paint it on and wait a few hours, keeping the surface slightly moist, then scrape off the paint.  No grinding, or at least, not as much.  It would take off about four layers of paint per application.  For a boat our size and condition, I'm guessing you would need about 15 gallons of the stuff to do the whole boat, and probably a high pressure washer would help, but it would all be worth the cost.   Had we been smart, we would have used this on the boat before anyone showed up to grind, then reapplied it after the first wave of volunteers when home for the day.   It may have made the job go much quicker, and it would have helped save our backs.

Scott never stopped working!

We don't quite know how she managed it, but Barbara's
 coverall remained clean throughout her grueling efforts.

We learned a lot of very important lessons, like hire someone else to do the dirty work, and use your friends for the things that don't require back breaking effort.  More importantly, you are going to blow through all of your friends for a very long time.  Any favors you had, you'll have used them up.  So think carefully before you go there.  On the bright side, you'll definitely know who your friends are.  We were amazed at how many folks came out, and how many came back again to help some more.

Terri needs to get out more.

Eventually we ground the boat down to the gel-coat.  It was grueling work, and each day we crashed exhausted into a bed that was twenty feet above sea level, only to wake up in a freezing cold boat surrounded in fog, with a 100 yard dash to the bathrooms.

At this point we've got the bottom mostly scraped clean, just a few hard to reach areas around the stern, and are about to patch up any small dents or pockmarks we find, slap on the epoxy barrier coat, then throw on a couple of new layers of bottom paint.  We're way behind schedule, and way over budget.  But that shouldn't be a surprise if you own a boat.

In the meantime, my hands are destroyed.  It was weeks before the blue dust exfoliated from my skin, I've no doubt taken several years off my life, and ingested enough toxins to have permanently altered my DNA.  I'm hoping for new super powers from this, preferably the one where I can see into the future and avoid death march boat projects.

But if there is anything good that came out of this project, we learned that the cruising life, with all its setbacks and demands, will probably be a cakewalk compared to what we've just gone through.  AnnMarie & I still had fun doing very hard work.  No matter how crazy the days became, how far behind schedule we fell, how exhausted we were, we still had friends there for us, we were there for each other, we laughed continuously, and we loved being together through it all.  You can't ask for more in life.  Well, actually, you can, like enough money to hire someone else to do all the work, but then we probably wouldn't appreciate it as much later on.  At this point, that's a risk I'm willing to take.

We'll cover finishing the bottom paint job in part two of this entry.

[editor's note: No one died during the first phase of this effort.  That may not sound like much to you, but it came as a major shock to the author.]

Thru-Hull Reduction Project

Twenty Holes, One Boat

A somewhat detailed description of how we eliminated eight (below the waterline) thru-holes.

We own a 45' Robertson & Caine "Leopard" catamaran. That means we bought a boat with twenty holes below the water line, all of which are potential leaks. "No way, there can't possibly be that many!" you say. Well, it breaks down like this (and because it is a catamaran, there are two hulls, and consequently twice as much of everything) . . .

Triton afloat in Trinidad

2 holes for the 2 rudder shafts.

2 holes for the 2 drive shafts.

2 holes for the 2 engine coolant water intakes.

2 holes for the 4 toilets' salt water intake (I'm surprised there wasn't 4, but the two toilets in each hull share an intake).

2 holes for the 2 holding-tank gravity drain outputs.

4 holes for the 4 toilet outputs.

4 holes for the 4 head sink drains.

2 holes for the instruments, both in the starboard hull (1 for the knotmeter, 1 for the depth sounder).

Too many hoses in this cabinet to make working on it easy!

Plus, there is a rat's nest of plumbing, valves, filters, pumps and hoses all stuffed into the maintenance cabinets behind the forward heads and in the engine compartments. Most of that is hard to get to, and if something started leaking, it would be a nightmare to fix, especially in a heavy sea.

But wait!  There's more!  That is only the stuff below the water line, as if that wasn't enough keep you up at night checking the bilges.  Above sea level there are another 20+ drain holes for various bilge pumps, galley and locker drains, engine exhaust ports, propane vents, diesel vents, holding tank vents and all are great places for water to get in.


Makes you feel warm and dry, doesn't it?   We really were concerned about them, and thought it was high time we did something.  But back to the underwater thru-hulls and valves, of which there were 14 we cared about.

The view from under the bridgedeck.  Lots more holes.

They were all bronze on our boat, and all original equipment as of 2000. The nice thing about bronze is that it is really strong and if handled properly will last years. . . right up until the point that galvanic corrosion or electrolysis eats away at it. Then it turns into a lovely copperish substance with all the holding strength of hard cheese, which you might not notice until it is too late.

What got us started down this road was the somewhat nagging worry that we might now have a problem.  We noticed that a few of our thru-hull valves were starting to show signs of wear, and had significant amounts of bluish green rust growing around them. Many of the values would no longer close completely. The last time we had hauled out was when we bought the boat [in 2006, it was now 2011!] and although they looked great at the time and we'd been regularly having the boat bottom cleaned and the zincs replaced, we'd been in a lot of different ports, marinas and anchorages since then and we're not sure all of these places had proper electrical grounding.  In other words, we were concerned that our valves or thru-hulls might be turning into brie.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus on board.
2008 Alameda Lighted Yacht Parade

 So we decided it was time to haul out and have a look for ourselves, and do something about the absurd number of thru-hulls.   And unlike our typical bay sailing excursions, where we often had twenty drunken Santas aboard at a time and glad we had enough heads to accommodate them all, we  felt that the existing plumbing arrangement [designed for the charter trade, with four separate bathrooms all expected to be in constant use by at least eight over-fed customers and an underpaid captain & cook] was hard to justify and didn't represent a realistic view of how we would live on the boat.  We felt that once we were out cruising we'd probably only need two toilets, one in the captain's berth, and one in the aft guest berth.  More than that seemed like overkill, and we didn't expect to have that many guests aboard at the same time.

Typical crew size.  We rarely had more than this aboard.

For what it is worth, we sailed from Tortola in the BVI's, to Trinidad, then along the coast of South America, through Central America, then back to San Francisco, usually with anywhere from four to seven people on board, and found that only two working heads were more than adequate.   Yes, it was great to have more, provided you didn't mind constantly fixing them.  [editor's note: If you feel differently, we welcome your input and, most importantly, your efforts in maintaining our marine toilets.  You are welcome to come fix them, preferably during the hot, humid season.  We will gladly watch and offer comments and criticisms while you hang upside down in the bilge.]

We were already comfortable with the rudder post mechanism because the fiberglass rudder sleeve terminated above the waterline and didn't represent as much of an issue.  We cleaned and rechecked the seals and they looked good.  We'd also tackled the drive shaft seals early on [see Propeller Shaft Mechanical Seal Replacement] and replaced them both with PCI mechanical seals, with which we've been very happy with ever since.  We also knew that the holding tank outlet thru-hull and raw water intake thru-hull would require a new fitting and valve and planned for that.

Now to solve the big problem, eliminating unnecessary thru-hulls.  Our first action was to decide which of those thru-hulls were absolutely mandatory, and which weren't.  Keep in mind that we intend to do a lot of blue water cruising, coastal navigation, and gunk-hole sailing in off-beat places and countries where we wouldn't necessary have easy access to a boat haul-out lift or well-equipped repair facility.   

By removing a head on each side, and eliminating the
direct pump-out, dramatically reduced our maintenance. 

Our desire was to limit the amount of plumbing and maintenance as much as possible, especially where items could rust or corrode, and to reduce our need for haul-outs.   Our justification was that every hole we removed from the boat made it that much easier to inspect, cheaper to maintain and safer to operate.  Less things to fail, less things to overlook, less things to fix, fewer boat yards to depend on, etc.

J.D. points out the holes we will seal.

We also decided we would eliminate of all four of the toilet's direct pump out ports.  Our thinking was that we could always pump directly into the holding tank instead, which had a gravity drain through the hull, achieving the same effect without relying on a joker valve ALWAYS working, but reducing the likelihood that a mechanical failure could flood the boat, and reducing by more than 66%  (because there would be only one large thru-hull & valve per side instead of three) the chance of a leak or mechanical failure.

That meant we'd be eliminating four of the 1.5" holes in the boat, four large thru-hulls, four large (and very expensive) seacocks, as well as four large (and also very expensive) anti-siphon valves and four of the (very expensive) three way valves (which were annoyingly hard to reach) and at least twenty feet of very expensive hose.  Hooray for us!

We also thought we could get rid of at least two of the four bathroom sink drains.  Since we wouldn't be using the forward bathrooms as much, it seemed like a good idea to tie the two lines together and only use one thru-hull.   In retrospect, we wish we'd taken out the remaining two sink drains, which we ended up doing anyway, about two months afterwards.

The sink drains run to the thru-hull ports just below the waterline along the outsides of the boat.   Our dear friend J.D. [pictured above-left pointing to three of the four holes (per side) we would initially patch] is also standing next to the one hole we regrettably left in place.   But to start with, we removed the two toilet thru-hulls and the aft bathroom sink drain thu-hull, and created a fiberglass "plug" for each of these holes.

The railway lift, Napa Valley Marina

But our first task was finding a marina that could haul us, somewhere within sailing distance of Emeryville. After much searching, we eventually brought our boat to the Napa Valley Marina, just up the Napa River, in beautiful Napa, CA.  Once we were up out of the water we were able to easily inspect the thru-hulls and valves.  

We were shocked at what we found. Several of the thru-hulls had corroded so much that the valves broke off in our hands as we tried to remove them. We were amazed at just how fragile they were, and a bit dismayed at the thought that a valve could have easily come apart while we were out sailing on the bay, or worse, miles away from land in a bad storm, leaving us with a 1" large (or better) hole in the boat.

We also discovered that both engine value thru-hulls were jammed up with fishing hooks and lines inside the valve and the tail piece elbow. This really surprised us, but it explained why we weren't able to close those particular valves completely. We're not sure how, when or where we picked these up, but it had to happen somewhere between La Paz and San Diego, because that is when we first noticed the problem. What is amazing is that it didn't seem to interfere with anything else. The engines didn't seem to run any hotter and we didn't seem have any problems with fishing line in the strainers, or worse still, anything working its way up to the impellers.

What was most distressing to us was the amount of deterioration in the valve's bronze that had taken place without us noticing. The valves had all been professionally inspected during our survey (and by ourselves as well) and they seemed fine at the time. Both the surveyor and I had independently examined each and every valve, and scraped the metal both inside and outside the boat. At the time, things looked great. Since that time we had been quite religious about keeping up with the zincs on the boat, changing them regularly, and we were very careful about properly connecting our boat's electrical system, and had it checked frequently.

But what we couldn't protect against was a stray current from another boat or dock. We really have no idea when it took place, but we assume it was during our trip back.  It seems unlikely it happened once we got home as our local marina is one of the most stringent in the bay area, especially where electrolysis and stray current/voltage is concerned. Every dock in our harbor has an in-water electronic monitoring system that can notice when a boat is improperly wired, and the marina regularly checks each boat's shore power lines for stray or improper current. Nonetheless, we ended up with very badly corroded valves and thru-hulls in the space of about four years and we didn't have much warning that it was happening.

Marelon 1.5" valve with flange plate.

That was quite a scary realization and it helped us in deciding to use non-metalic valves and thru-hulls wherever possible on the vessel. To that end, we elected to use Forespar's Marelon Valves. These are valves made out of a corrosion free/electrolysis free material that has a strength comparable to bronze, although I would caution you against assuming the same is true of their other products.  [For more on this, see Thru-hull Flange Plate and Marelon Flanged Valve Installation.]

But before we could do anything else, we needed to plug the thru-hulls we intended to eliminate.  One of the best assets of Napa Valley Marina is their staff, and especially their fiberglass expert, Kelly Howell, pictured here, trying not to laugh at the idiot in the bunny suit.

Kelly Howell on right, the Wonder Bunny on left.

Because we had only limited experience with fiberglass, and this was such an important and critical job, we didn't feel comfortable taking on this project by ourselves. Kelly was happy to explain everything we needed to do, and work with us acting as an instructor and foreman. He made sure the project was done right, and we used the least amount of his time to achieve it. If you need to do a big fiberglass project where most of the work can be done yourself, hiring him to help out and keep you on track is a great way to cut costs and still buy piece of mind.  But if you are going to do this, our advice is to make sure that you don't try to schedule that effort along side any other task.  We tried to get a bunch of stuff done simultaneously, and we found that the responsibility of keeping an entire crew of friends busy made it very difficult to also efficiently make use of his time & expertise.  We often had to deal with emergencies that cropped up, which meant having to let Kelly do the work for us.  Less of a savings than we had hoped, but at least we knew the work was being "done right the first time".

A clean, well lighted place to epoxy.

One of the most valuable lessons we learned from Kelly was to get everything prepped ahead of time, to always work in a clean, organized manner, and to only do as much of the project at one time as is reasonable.  Getting prepped meant starting with a reasonable work area, and preparing the work site, including cleaning up anything you've been grinding on with acetone.  Another great tip we got was to have a small plastic bowl of acetone handy, filled about 2" high.  Make sure you are wearing protective gloves (in fact, wear two sets of them so that if you hands become hopelessly sticky you can pull off the outer set and still keep going) and as you are working the fiberglass, dip your fingers into the bowl to clean off the epoxy and mat that sticks to them.   [editor's note: Epoxy chemicals are quite toxic, make sure you are wearing the appropriate gear, including eye protection, gloves, long sleeved clothes, respirators, etc.  Don't take on a project like this without adequate supervision and training.  Consult a professional before modifying your boat, and don't assume anything we say here is correct, complete or concise.]

Thru-hole to be patched, just after
we'd removed the mushroom.

We needed to plug the existing thru-holes that we weren't using any more, and to do so we would create a "rivet" of fiberglass (think of an upper case letter "I" turned sideways, that encased the hull]) which would fill the entire hole but also overlapped the hull skin on both sides and be bonded with it inside and out.   To do so, we needed to first prep the hole.  This meant first removing the thru-hull and any caulk or sealant, then scoring back the balsa core a bit but leaving the hull laminate intact, so that there was about a 1/4" of balsa removed.

The area surrounding the thru-hull mushroom will be filled with some form of caulking or sealant.   If you're lucky, the prior installer won't have used the dreaded 5200, or some other type of glue, which can make removing things quite annoying, but in any event, you will want to grind out enough core that you create an interior cavity between the two hull skins larger than the existing opening.  This will also allow you to examine the core itself for signs of damage or water intrusion.

[editor's note: The thru-hulls on many of these boats were "supposed" to go through an area of laminated marine plywood, but unfortunately not all of them did.  Sometimes the installers missed when they installed the core hole, especially on the holes along the side of the boat.  Sometimes they put the core hole into only half of the plywood.  Don't be surprised if the hole through your boat exposes balsa core, or plywood, or some combination.  Regardless, the balsa and/or plywood should be dry and intact.]  

Make sure you scrape back the balsa about 1/4" from the edge
of the hole, grind the hull surfaces inside the hull to achieve a
good bonding surface as well.  This hole went completely
though the balsa and missed the  plywood entirely.

You'll need to cut back whatever you find there from the edge of the hole.  We tried several different tools to do this, including a chisel, a drill, but what worked best was an air powered hand grinder with a small enough grinding bit that it could fit in the hole.  What didn't work was an allen wrench placed in the end of a drill chuck, which sounded like a great idea at the time, but turned out not to work as well on the plywood as it did on balsa cores.

When coring out the balsa, do be careful, it is very easy to take away more than you intend to, especially near the hull laminate.  Go slowly, and don't cut away the hole edge or enlarge the opening.  You want to remove about a 1/4 inch of balsa/plywood back from the opening of the hole edge only.  Make sure there is none of the old sealant or caulk remaining, and that you sand the fiberglass inside the hole so that the surface is roughed up.  Then sand down to the fiberglass (past the gelcoat) around the hole on both exterior surfaces, creating a smooth circle about 6 inches around.  Make sure you get down past the gelcoat and that you don't gouge up the surface.  Try to feather back the edges of the gelcoat slightly as well.  This means attacking the job from both inside and outside the boat, and it turns out to take way more time than you think it should, but this is one place you really want to go slow and be methodical.  Clean the surfaces completely with acetone when you are done.

Grind the surface around the hole back past
 the gelcoat, leaving a smooth surface.  You
can see the plywood core as well as the
balsa on this opening.

We used polyester resin, fiberglass mat, and MEK-P hardener for much of this project.  We probably could have also used the West Systems two-part epoxy, but polyester resin was the appropriate choice of material for our boat.  It was also less expensive.  Be aware that when bonding to existing fiberglass, not all materials work the same, and if you aren't sure, seek the advice of an expert before attempting to modify your boat.  It is important to create a strong chemical bond, and while epoxy will stick to polyester, the opposite isn't true.  [editor's note: The hardening agent (catalyst) we used for the polyester resin is called MEK-P, and it should be treated with the utmost care.  If you get this in your eyes or skin it will cause intense burns and can result in blindness.  Do not use this without proper safety equipment including eye protection, gloves, respirators and protective clothing.   If you do come in contact with it, rinse the area immediately with water and seek medical attention.]

We then needed to create a thick fiberglass putty for the project, which we would eventually use to plug the holes.  We poured enough resin into a 1/2 gallon tub to fill it halfway, then added equal measures of West Systems 404 high-density filler and 406 colloidal silicate to it.  This thickens (and strengthens) the resin and makes it into a putty like material.  Be careful, these materials are a breathing hazard and will fly away in the lightest breeze; make sure you are wearing a respirator when working, and avoid closed spaces.   We needed to add enough of the fillers to create a peanut-butter like paste that did not "flow".  We set it aside in an airtight container (and didn't add the hardener yet), because we would be using this in small batches to plug all the holes.   We were able to keep this around for the length of the project, only adding hardener to small portions as we needed it.


We then cut four circles of fiberglass mat for each side of the hole, ranging in size from 3 inches to 6 inches and labeled them 1 through 4 in order of increasing size.  We made a complete set of these for each side of every hole we were going to patch.

We filled a pint container about half way with resin, then added an appropriate amount of hardener.  You'll notice the color of the resin change slightly when you do so, which is a good reminder whether you've added it or not.   It isn't uncommon to forget if you've added hardener and if you do forget you'll wonder why your patch is still gooey the next day, if you add twice as much hardener you're epoxy will harden far too fast, and if you really add too much it will even catch fire!  Fortunately, if you aren't sure, you can tell by what color it is, so make a mental note of this the first time you mix the two.

We used a small (cheap) paint brush to paint the interior facing fiberglass hull (the skin inside the boat that we had already roughed up with sandpaper) with Smith's two-part penetrating epoxy.  That helped create a surface that the patches would adhere to.  We then placed the four concentric circles of mat on a cardboard box and saturated them with the resin/hardener mixture, making sure to completely soak the mat.

You can see the sunlight shining through
the mat before we'd filled the hole with
epoxy paste.  We also sanded this down
   and painted it with gelcoat to finish it.

The mat should become translucent when it contacts the fiberglass, and any air pockets will appear as small opaque bubbles.  Place the smallest circle of mat over the hole on the inside of the hull, then work out any air bubbles that have been trapped between the mat and the hull surface, using your paint brush and/or a squeegee, and work them out towards the edges.  We had to work quickly (before the material started to set) so that we could then place the next larger circle over it and repeat the process of removing air bubbles, until we'd built up a series of plates that overlapped each other and extend out beyond the hole's radius by at least 3 inches, and allowed them to harden completely.

Build up the surface layer to meet the gelcoat, so that there is
as little sanding as possible required afterwards.

We allowed the patch to harden overnight.  We needed to wait for the dew to burn off every morning before we could begin the next step.  The temperature and humidity matter greatly when working with fiberglass, so take that into account when using this material.

We next gently roughed up the inside surface of the patch (from outside the boat) with a small sanding wheel, to allow the plug to bond to it better, and painted this surface and the rest of the interior area with the two-part penetrating epoxy, which is thinner than resin and will saturate into the balsa and help create a good chemical bond with the hull skin.

Filling the holes with the resin putty.
Work quickly, as the mixture will
become difficult to use as it hardens.

We now had a pocket we could fill in (from the outside of the boat) with the thick paste we made earlier.   We divided out enough of the paste to fill one hole completely, then put it into a smaller plastic container.


[editor's note:  Months before you start in on any fiberglassing project, begin by saving your plastic yogurt and cottage cheese containers, as these work great for epoxy trays.   The boat yard makes a small fortune selling you "special" plastic tubs; you could buy the two containers filled with delicious food for what they will charge you for an empty one.


That same markup, by the way, applies to sand paper, paint brushes, rollers, tape, cardboard, etc. Try to have as much of this stuff on hand as possible, before you begin your project, and if you need to, go buy it at a hardware store instead.  Make sure you have lots of paint brushes, paint stirrers and fiberglass mixing sticks on hand, as you'll go through these faster than you think ]

Kelly next to the first plugged hole.

We added the hardening agent and mixed thoroughly, then filled in the hole with the mixture until it was just slightly sticking out past the hull on both sides.  We smoothed off the surface so that we had as clean a match to the hull as possible, with about 1/16" excess above the surface, which we later feathered back with a grinder using 36 grit sandpaper.  We allowed it to harden completely.  Once dry, we ground this flush with the hull surface.

Next, we repeated the same process (but from the outside hull) of adding the circles of glass mat to this plug, overlapping each circle and building the final layer up to just above the level of the gelcoat.   Ultimately we wanted to get as smooth a surface as possible, to reduce the amount of fairing (grinding back the excess fiberglass to achieve a smooth surface) we'd need to do.   Since this patch was below the water line, and we were going to add an epoxy barrier coat over it anyway, so we didn't need to worry about using gelcoat on the outside.

We really wish we'd have plugged all four holes the first time.

We did grind smooth and cover over the interior patch with gelcoat, so that the surface wasn't rough to the touch.   That turned out to be more important than I realized at the time, as any small imperfections or bits of fibers sticking up out of the patch are like little razor blades.  We wanted to knock these down with a grinder and then cover the area with gelcoat to get a smooth finish.

We now had plugged holes, that should be as strong, if not stronger than the hull itself.  Providing we'd properly (chemically) bonded the new glass mat with the old, and that there was no initial water damage to the core, this plug should be just as water-tight and last the lifetime of the boat.  It will definitely outlast the owner, given the amount of fumes and dust we've breathed in during the process.

That left us ready to add the flanged valves and their backing plates, finish grinding off the old paint, add an epoxy barrier coat, and paint the hull.  Now I know how Sisyphus felt.