CONTINUOUSWAVE

About a year ago I finished redoing my 1966 NAUSET 16. I put about six months of work into it, and it looked great.

On a fishing trip I was on my NAUSET 16 heading back home going through Beaufort inlet and something happened. I'm not sure if I hit something or if the hull laminate was too thin in the area of the bow, but a large hole was created. The effect was to "scoop" water which under power cracked the hull along the chine and blew out the fiberglass on the port side towards the transom. I was still two miles from home when I noticed something was wrong and the current was ripping in the inlet with my wife on board so I decided to continue which of course is why the scooping of the water made the damage so severe. Luckily we did make it home and the boat still floated so I could move it from the boat lift to trailer a couple days later.

I need figure out what to do with this boat that broke my heart.


Q1: is repair of the damage described above possible?

Q2: should I just get rid of the hull?

I'm not really worried about how it looks cosmetically. I would just like this 16-footer to be repaired so it can be usable again.

The hull damage can be seen in the link to youtube below:

https://youtube.com/shorts/7jThtUFUAMM?si=bb5IreAwhMxUJe-j

—Matt

In your motion picture presentation (on youTube), the movement of the camera is so fast and unstabilized that assessing the damage to the hull is difficult. I recommend you use still photographs of the areas of principal damage to illustrate the hull failure.

For advice on making structural repairs to the Unibond hull of a Boston Whaler boat, read the factory advice about such repairs in the REFERENCE section at

INSTRUCTIONS -- HULL PATCH KITS
https://continuouswave.com/whaler/refer ... tions.html

This article reproduces in HTML the original printed instructions supplied by the Boston Whaler factory to owners and dealers regarding hull repairs.

I would expect that repair of your NAUSET 16 hull could be done, resulting in a seaworthy hull. Whether or not you in particular have the skill, the time, and the interest in making those repairs is difficult to judge.

At a minimum, I would expect that repair of the hull will require the hull to be taken off the boat lift, the engine and interior components will need to be removed, the bare hull will have to be put on a support structure in an inverted position, and the structural fractures and large missing sections of outer skin will have to be skillfully repaired following the instructions. One area I would deviate from the instructions is to use epoxy resin as the adhesive to form the new layers of fiberglass and ensure they are properly adhered to the remaining foam. Also, before any repair work can begin, any water in the foam will need to be dried and evaporated, as no resin will bond well to wet foam. This drying process could take considerable time, depending on the climate you are in.

Thank you for the quick reply and the plethora of information Jim! I will take a look and see what I can accomplish. I will admit my motion picture was filmed while floating under the boat in an inner tube to assess damage.