Well I got reminded why I DIDN'T want a fiberglass boat. When I took the boat out a little over a month ago, I ran across a rock bar trying to get back to a beach to let my son out to play. It initially looked like I got lucky and only hit the prop and a little of the skeg, so I replaced the prop and took it out Monday. When I got home I noticed a chunk of gel coat hanging loose, looked underneath, and seen my worst fears. I gouged up about a 2 foot section of the gel coat, with about a 4 inch section down into the glass. So I have spent all afternoon sanding out the old gel coat to bevel it back to accept a new coat, cleaning up the glass, and recoating it. It would have helped if I could have found some ge coat paste because of the depth of the gouging, but all I could get was gel coat finish. So 3 coats later, I'm now ready to sand it out flat, and hopefully finish sand it. The other catch was they were out of brown AND yellow tinting, so I now have a nice WHITE section on my hull bottom. I figured it was better to have a white section, than to allow it to wear into the fiberglass. Days like today make me remember why I LIKED having an aluminum jon boat, it just scratched up the bottom and kept going, not 6 hours of fiberglass and gel work to fix.

Run it in Anclote river for a couple times and it will blend in lol.

Ended up on coat #4, and some water dripped out of the gel coat. Checked and a section flaked off. So sanded the spot back down, put a 500 watt flood light on it, and waiting for it to dry out fully, THEN do coat #5. I HATE FIBERGLASS WORK!

Just learned a new trick. If you get teh fiberglass good and hot with a halogen lamp. leave it on while you put the gel coat down, you can build it up in layers very quickly. I found it took about 2 minutes to skin over with the light on it, and I was able to brush on a layer, smooth it over with a flat paddle, let it skin in about 2 minutes, and repeat about 4 times before what was in my cup bagan to harden. Got the spot all taken care of it looks like, so should be good to go for Thursday.

Just do like I do and say F-IT. Mine spends its life on the trailer or boatlift so who needs gel anyways...