Hey Bullswan,

You're heading in the right direction. I don't think Vertglas is a panacea, but you're light years ahead of the guys who believe in painting to restore faded hulls. Vertglas claims that it makes your gelcoat completely impervious to UV degredation. That's not accurate. It doesn't. But it should, if correctly applied, do an acceptable job of protecting your hulls for the bulk of the sailing season. Ant that's really all that matters.

Wyatt, I'm with you. Once you do something that doesn't work very well, why keep on doing it? Hobienick, Catman, and all you guys who believe paint is the answer, I don't want to dissuade you from painting if your heart is set in that direction. But all you're doing is covering up old oxidized damage and doing nothing to prevent it from happening to your new paint job. Some paints are better than others, that's true, and will resist breakdown by the sun better than others. But they all deteriorate after a relatively short period of time.

If your hulls are damaged by deep scratches or cracks then you've got a repair job to do on the gelcoat. Other than these specific areas I would never sand the gelcoat. It's there for a purpose.

Calcheck I hate to disagree with you, but if we could prevent UV damage; the amount of damage from ozone wouldn't be enough to prompt anybody to correct it. Guys think about it for a minute. Why is it that every car ever owned, always faded if parked outside for a period of time. In fact UV penetrates inside the car and the dash, seats, door panel, etc. all fad too. My living room carpet is faded in the area that the sun reaches. So what is it that causes this fading? It isn't ozone. It's UV light. It causes oxidation on a molecular level.

If you want to protect your hulls, tramp, lines, etc. then the boat must be covered when not in use. Period!!!! If you want your boat protected when you're out on the water, an area of intense UV light, then you have to cover everthing with a protectorant. It sounds like most of you have boats that are pretty degraded, so you would be well advised to pony up seventy bucks for the Vertglass restoration kit. If your boat isn't too badly oxidized, you should be able to get buy with Vertglas Sealer for twenty seven to fifty bucks. I'd rather spend ten bucks for a little bottle of 303 Protectant and wipe the hulls down every couple of months. I suppose it takes me the better part of ten minutes. The friction caused by the water moving over the hulls, will over time, remove the surface coating of both 303 Protectant and Vertglass. The thirty or forty minutes a year I spend doing maintenance, saves me from the hours and hours of hard grunt work guys have to do when their boat has bad hull damage.

Prindle 16, it takes a fair amount of sales to justify stocking a product. Looking at all the cats I run into it, seems to me there isn't much of a market to justify stocking this stuff. We still have lots of guys who believe waxing is doing something good for their boat. Overall looks to me like most guys don't do anything to take care of their boats.

In a way this thread is a bit of an irony for me because I'm more interested in taking care of the hulls from the water line down. I wouldn't ever set my hulls on anything but my little foam rests.

Daniel