Hi Guys

My first post here so apologies if this is in the wrong forum or is answered elsewhere... But I have been reading up on past threads on hull leaks but couldnt find anthing specific to the Inter 17 so here goes...

Story is we have a boat built around '97 or '98 and get roughly 4 X as much water in the starboard hull than the port. Unfortunately we have never actually captured and measured the amount (we dont have drain plugs) but after a standard 2-3 hour outing or race we would have about 5 sponge loads in one and 20 in the other.. We would expect roughly the same in both so assumed something was wrong. We thought we had found the problem when we noticed the inspection port had a couple of broken rivets and could be lifted half off the deck, but we removed it, re-siliconed it and pop riveted it back into place and the leak ratio seems just the same..

Today we did pressure tests on the hull with a compressor and aerosol generator hoping to see where the aerosol "smoke" came out, but it was windy day and not too conclusive so we ended up doing a standard soap bubble test instead.

Both hulls blew bubbles around the daggerboard slots but it was hard to see exactly where and in addition the port hull had a crack around 6" long that blew bubbles along the top deck where the non slip edge joins the smooth gel coat. This puzzled us as we thought this was the "good' hull but our last outing was fairly exciting (ie, high speed pitchfork.) and though I thought the boats were designed to take this it could be new damage we have done...

Anyway to the specific questions if anyone has been down this road before us..

1) Are there any known weak points on the daggerboard slots where the leak will probably be (ie, front or back and top or bottom etc..)

2) Do we have any reasonable chance of repairing this by running new gel coat or epoxy down the slot to seal from the outside or will we need to cut in new inspection hatches and repair internally from behind..?

3) Any recommendations on which material/system would be best for the repair.?

4) I thought the hulls were 2 piece and split vertically with a central seam top and bottom and that the beige colour non slip top panel was just a cosmetic cover but now I am not so sure.. is the top deck a seperate piece that is then bonded together.?

Thanks to anyone able to shed some light on this..!