Blisters
Steve R and I met at the boat yard today. I came with resin and hardener. He came with everything else: a drill with a paint remover disk, cups for mixing resin, throw-away paint brushes, and I don’t remember what all else.
He arrived before I did, and had started squirting water on the bottom and drawing circles. He showed me that the water helped us to see the raised spots on the boat bottom more easily. The raised spots were places where water had gotten in and formed blisters. Not too bad blisters are those that occur within the boat’s gelcoat. The ‘bad’ blisters are those that have gotten into the fiberglass.
After he’d gone over the entire bottom, Steve took the drill with the paint remover disk, held it sideways, and ‘sanded off’ the spots. Most were just raised spots that he sanded off. A few actually had liquid in them and they popped like water blisters. Books I’ve read since said that some of those things have quite a bit of pressure under them and that one should be careful when they pop. Luckily, mine just oozed.
We then mixed the resin and hardener and he showed me how to paint the mixture onto the spots. For the deeper ones, we took fiberglass matting and placed it in the hole.
There were a few bumps on the keel. Those we filled with some type of filler – I’ll need to find out what we used, which was mixed with the resin.
Tomorrow, I’ll need to come back, sand these down, and put another coat of resin on them.