Remember, the whole challenge with this boat is that it was full of blisters. It had been left in the water for many many years. As a result, it had what someone described as having a "constellation" of blisters all over the bottom. Maybe a better description would have been, it looked like the surface of the moon. Here are a few "before" pictures.
So I seriously considered taking a planer, and shaving off all of the gelcoat on this boat. If it weren't a one design I think I would have done that. The gelcoat was so blistered that it was difficult to see any areas that weren't blistered. We started by sanding off the old ant-fouling paint and then an old layer of what appeared to be Interlux 2000 (gray). At that point the blisters were in plain sight. Some had already been opened up by the sanding, but many were not. We discovered that a strong pressure washer did a great job of taking off some of the gelcoat and opening up the blisters as well.
But what in the end proved to be the most effective was to use a dremmel tool, with a 60-grit sanding wheel, and manually grinding out each blister. It was painstaking work, and took forever. There were a few sections where the gelcoat had become so delaminated, that it flaked off leaving entire regions bare to the fiberglass. It was about this time that our wives started referring to the boat as FreeDumb!! I was beginning to wonder about this myself. In the end, the entire below water section of the hull looked just like this.
If you do this yourself, please be sure to wear eye protection and a good respirator, as the fluid in the blisters is nasty and the dust certainly would not be good for the lungs.
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