78 Seafari 20?

[Fr. Frank]

Avoid the Noid. It could be a good project, but only if you're not currently working on one.

I worked on and rigged SeaCraft boats from mid '83 to Feb '85, at two different SeaCraft dealerships. Many if not most late 70's boats had liner and cap problems problems like insufficient glass on the underside of the decks, gunwales, and hatches, leaving bare wood exposed or maybe just sprayed with a thin layer of gel-coat. They rotted pretty quickly, and the topside would craze easily, seemingly brittle. I never saw any abnormal problems with the hulls, though.

I know a few new SeaCrafts in '84 had problems with air pockets beneath the gel-coat along the chines. You could take a small ball-pein hammer and tap along the chines and find thumb-sized voids where the gel-coat would collapse when tapped in every single '84 hull we checked. We began checking every one, too, and immediately repairing them before putting them out for sale. The manufacturer claimed it was a problem with the resin being used.

Same things happened again in the mid-late 80's when Tracker took over. Tracker even used 3/4" plywood-core stringers in SeaCraft hulls in '87 & '88. I never saw any pattern of mfg. difficulties with hulls and transoms, though, in any year.

Denny, I had just been hired to manage the in/out storage at Rybovich Marina in December '84 when Spencer Marine added the in/out marina to their purchase of Rybovich Boat Works from Fisher Body. Spencer closed the dry storage marina and let me go in Feb. of '05, when they decided they were going to build a condo on the spot, then decided to reopen the marina a few months later when the permitting for the condo was denied. By then, I had gone on to manage the Bayside Boatel in Ocean City, MD.