Wooden boat protection

My wooden Solo is really nice - I would be sad to swap it for one of the FRP boats. I am told FRP is faster, but I'm yet to be convinced of that. One big advantage of FRP though is less maintenance.

I was checking my boat as it is getting towards the colder/wetter months and realised some work on the decks might be needed. At first glance the decks look great, but take a closer look and you can see a tiny crack in the varnish in several places. Weirdly, these cracks are straight lines. I thought these were panel joins, but they are odd places to join whole panels together.

Our local repair expert is Jamie Stewart at SM Composites. Jamie worked on my boat before when there was some damage to the hull and he has fixed a number of boats at our club, both wooden and FRP. Jamie owns a wooden Solo himself and he knows a lot about the boat. So I gave Jamie a call and explained the problem. It turns out these are not panel joins. More alarmingly, it is the start of delamination in the plywood where different top layers meet.

Jamie told me you can simply re-varnish the boat to stop the problem, but there is an alternative treatment. It is possible (for a professional!) to strip the decks back to the wood and spray a layer of epoxy, followed by coats of varnish. Jamie explained that this is a much more permanent way to protect the plywood. The bad news for me is that this is nearly twice the price of a re-varnish. I didn't want to do this every year!

But the epoxy/varnish coating is super-strong and lasts much longer than varnish alone. Jamie said it should be 8 - 10 years before the decks needed any work again. This makes the boat just as maintenance free as FRP.

So in January my boat goes over to SM Composites for the epoxy work. 

I will report back afterwards ⛵