SUJET :

Dear friends,
During outage I am concidering to strip the hull down to the gel coat and have a few layers of epoxy (five) in order to protect the boat from osmosis. Is this concidered to be a necessity? Does any one has experience with this work? please advise.

Thanks
Constandinos.
P.S. Sorry about the English.

Pour ceux qui ne lisent pas l'anglais, je traduis la demande de Constandinos:

Pendant que le bateau est à sec, je pense gratter la coque jusqu'au gel coat, et couvrir de 5 couches d'époxy pour protéger contre l'osmose. Est ce nécessaire ? Quelqu'un a t il expérimenté ce travail ? Merci de vos conseils.

Of course it's necessary!!

If the boat stays in the water for several months the better it is that you done that job.

I did mine in 2014 and it's quite a messy job if you don't hire a professional to do it with a glass blaster.
Cost around. 1400-1800 eur here in Sweden.
Paint removal products is just messy to use.
I removed the old paint with a metabo lacquer planer.
Wich can strip of paint in tenths of a millimeter and sucked it to an industrial vacuum cleaner worked pretty good for me.

Good luck!
Patrik

Dear Patric, Gerard, fellow Feeling owners,
Happy new year.
Thanks for the information. At the moment the boat is on the hard and all old layers of antifouling removed to gel coat. I am currently taking moisture measurements and hopefully I will be ready to paint in the middle of February (total 14 weeks drying time). For the sake of exchange of information, drying out is a very slow process (1% drop in moisture per week measured with a GRP-33 moisture meter) followed by weekly hull wash. I have a few gel coat cracks which I have opened with a dremel tool and will be repaired with epoxy resin and epoxy putty. Then the hull be covered with five layers of epoxy primer and three coats of antifouling.

In order to order paint I have to calculate the exact surface area of the hull. I have used the formula from International paint which is 0.5*Waterline legth*(beam+draught) which results to 23 m2 approximately. Do you know exactly the underwater surface area of the hull?
Thanks and best regards
Constandinos