Better Way to a Brighter Hull

When I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad sold the last of his many lapstrake wooden runabouts and bought a fiberglass boat. I thought that meant the end of springtime drudgery, the end of wearing the skin off my fingers sanding places, like the underside of the strakes on the outside of the hull and the tops of the strakes and around the frames on the inside, that Dad couldn’t reach with his sander. Hey, I was a kid, and gullible, and the messiahs of reinforced fiberglass, the latest and greatest boatbuilding material, were saying it never needed maintenance. They even claimed you didn’t have to paint the bottom, since barnacles couldn’t cling to the shiny gelcoat surface. What could be better?

Then, on a warm Saturday in early April, Dad handed me a bottle of boat soap, a can of wax and a bunch of rags and pointed me towards the boat resting on its cradle in our backyard. As we all know today, although you don’t have to maintain fiberglass to keep it from disintegrating, if you don’t clean and protect the