Advice on what to do about my boat, Fiberglass work

[mtnoffroad]

Hey wondering if I could get a hand in making a tough decision. I have a boat that I have been very happy with. Unfortunately it has some hull problems. The boat is a 1989 22.5 footer with a cuddy cabin and when I bought it I noticed it had some spider webbing in the fiberglass on the hull. THe price was very very good so I bought it anyway and took it to a guy to have the spider webbing looked into. He looked it over and said it looked like it was no big deal and gave me a quote to fix it, got it fixed, took 2 months longer than he said but hey it looked great when I got it. Ran it till the end of last season and then one of the patches recracked. I brought it to his attention he had it for three weeks and then said it wasnt his fault because it must have a board in the hull that is pressing outward and it put pressure on the hull and cracked it. He said it was no good to work on because the hull had been in the water recently and that I would be better off to let it sit and dry for a few months before it was worked on. I was upset but agreed, he also stated that it would be fine to run it as long as I was on calm waters and not beating on it. Well Long story short I have not been able to get ahold of him to finish the repairs so I took it out the other day for a quick test run and low and behold I get back to the dock and a second patch he did came completely off while out on the water. I have had no luck finding anyone who can do the work in the next year!!!! This was a surprise.

now what I am wondering is do I try and do the work myself (pretty good at any mechanical work but never done glass) or do I start looking for a boat with a bad motor or drive to swap my parts over to (on a tight budget right now). Swapping the motor and drive is a no brainer for me as I did marine work for several years to make a living in highschool and college and still do from time to time. Opinions? (p.s. if you know someone able to do the fiberglass work I would be interested as well, especially if they can tell me why I have the problems I have)

[ScottC]

Very hard to say exactly what happened, but it sounds like he ground out the areas where the spider webbing problem was and filled it with the wrong type of filler. There are other variables that come into play, such as proper mixing of the resin, etc... But without seeing the boat this is all a guess.

My fear is when he said the boat should dry out before attempting to work on it again. Leads me to believe he suspects water seepage into the glass itself. Again, too hard to call without pics or something.

As to what you should do...Again, without seeing the boat it is impossible to make a judgement call on what you should do next.