CONTINUOUSWAVE

My 18' Outrage was left in its covered boat barn while we evacuated Rockport [Texas]. As you can see from the picture below, there isn't much left of the boat barn or the stuff I had hanging on the walls. Unfortunately, something hit my boat with enough force to punch a hole in the hull. In doing so, it also pushed the foam hard enough to crack the inner liner. It happened right at the tunnel where the [fuel] filler line turns horizontal.

I have searched the forum and found some good articles about repairing Whaler hulls, but they don't address something that punched through the liner as well. I think I can fix it. I am looking for others who have had to make similar repairs to understand if there are other tricks I need to be aware of. I have gotten rid of felled trees and rebuilt my fence so I am ready to tackle this. The adjuster came last week to look at [the boat], but I have not heard from my insurance.

I see it as straight forward.

Cut back the damage and grind it back.
Add needed foam, shave and trim back.
Apply cloth and grind out.
Spray gelcoat.

cf: http://continuouswave.com/whaler/reference/whalerRepair.html

We had nearly identical damage to our 1988 Revenge 25 WT. I took it to Nauset Marine in Orleans on Cape Cod, a long established Boston Whaler dealer.

I picked up the repaired boat one week later and could not find any sign of the repair. It was undetectable. I could have NEVER been able to accomplish this if I tried myself. They matched the gel coat perfectly, even after a dozen years of being in the sun. When I sold that boat, I gave the new owners 100-percent disclosure. They couldn't believe any damage was ever there.

The hull damage shown would be repaired as described in the REFERENCE section article. See

INSTRUCTIONS -- HULL PATCH KITS
http://continuouswave.com/whaler/refere ... tions.html

The method is shown being performed in a very detailed and illustrated companion article:

Repairing Hull Damage the Whaler Way
http://continuouswave.com/whaler/refere ... epair.html

I don't see anything in the method described that would make it inappropriate for repair of your hull. I suspect you would first repair the outer hull, perhaps using more laminate layers than original to strength the area. Then the inner liner would be repaired with a similar method. If I were undertaking the repair, I would contact Boston Whaler Customer Service representative Chuck Bennett and solicit advice from him.

If the internal foam is now fractured and no longer in one structural piece, you may want to replace some of the foam by using already-cured blocks of foam. The strength of the hull is formed in part by the structural connection between hull and liner via their mutual bond to the foam. The foam prevents either the liner or hull from deformed by linking the two laminate structures together so that one reinforces the other. A repair must provide the same linkage.

The only hard part of this repair is the color matching. It takes knowing color theory. You might be better to pay someone with these skills to do the gel coat. If you try it yourself, make sure you are happy with the color match before you proceed.