Boatyard

With the right products and tools, along with a healthy portion of elbow grease, it's possible to give an older sailboat's gelcoat a new lease on life.

- MARK PILLSBURY

After spending backto-back intervals of a couple of years with us living aboard between haulouts, the white hull of our 1978 Sabre 34 began to look a bit worse for wear. Oxidation on the gelcoat gave the boat a drab finish and, to make matters worse, try as we might to keep after it with scratch pads and detergents, a dull yellowish-orange stain clung to the area just above and below the boot stripe.

In the winters, we kept the boat at a marina in Newport, Rhode Island, where we had ready access to fresh water and electricity, but come spring, work and weather often conspired to keep exterior maintenance to a minimum. Sure, we made feeble attempts to wash, wax, and use an electric buffer to polish up the hull, but working from the dock or from an inflatable just didn't seem to set things right. And then, soon as you knew it, mid-May arrived, and we had to be off the dock and out on a mooring for the summer. It's tough to run an electric buffer at a mooring.

In the end, we decided that we had two choices if we wanted our boat to look shipshape again: Paint the topsides or do a proper haulout to restore luster to the gelcoat.

In recent years, a number of good coatings have made a do-it-yourself paint job a realistic option. A dock-neighbor couple took this route, and after a short spell on the hard that included rolling and tipping with a good-quality paint, their boat reappeared with a mirrorlike finish. It was gorgeous.