Early this morning I was happy to be getting work done on deck on my way to painting. A question I had about possibly removing another thru hull sent me below to poke around. I discovered that a nearby thru hull had been removed at some time but the holes had only been filled with compound. While that was a little worrisome from the inside view, I knew that I could not leave this one alone. I had to see what had been done on the outside.

Near the center of the photo is a nice round circle with four small bolt hole circles all simply filled with epoxy putty. No bevels. No cloth. Nothing but putty. This spurred a broad hunt beneath the old barrier coat (almost assuredly Interprotect) for other significant sins or failures. It turns out that the "well-adhered" gray barrier coat is stuck pretty well to underlying layers but, in places, those layers are not necessarily all that well-attached to the hull. The owners of the H38 Kotchka reported Interprotect barrier coat failure in Ocean navigator, but in their case the Interprotect was not well-adhered to the hull.

Of particular worry is what appears to be odd white/blue dotted areas that are apparent remnants of someone "hot-coating." That didn't work well! On top of that is the gray barrier which should have never been applied without stripping everything off first. Previous exploration had only turned up an adhesion problem on the port side of the keel, a problem I had attributed to weak bonding to the lead casting.

As you can see, I ground all coatings off a test patch. A couple of previous gouges (under the blue paint) had been filled with a polyester resin putty. The stuff easily popped out. It appears I have been naive about these coatings. No more. Everything is coming off down to bare hull. Happily, I was down to bare hull in some areas before this discovery. Having six coats of epoxy in intimate contact with only the original hull will be comforting. Eliminating improper thru hull patches and weak polyester filler will also be good.

Is this sort of stuff done in a yard by paid professionals? Reading Surveyor David Pascoe's reports would suggest that it is. Yikes.