Sailfish problems......

[spareparts]

i worked for a dealer that handled Sea Craft from 99-01, we dropped the line for various reasons, one of them being the amount of gel cracks that were visable in the non skid and the corners. The gel cracks were showing up before the boats were even sold, each one had less than 20 hours of demo time on them. we really looked for the cause and determined it was not a true structural failure, nothing broke, nothing came loose, the boats were still in one piece. the issue was, that SeaCraft used so much gel to achieve the aggresive nonskid pattern, it was cracking due to flex in flat areas. How much was it flexing? Not enough to see with the eye. Remember, gel is not structural, its just there as a filler and top coat, its extremmly brittle. Fiberglass resin will crack if it is set up alone, add some type of mat to it, and its super strong and rigid. SeaCraft, as are many other manufactures are building boats using many composites, trying to make their boats light and efficient. Composites don't soak up the bumps like wood will, and transfer a lot of these stresses to other areas of the boat( usually corners or large flat areas). Would i be mad if my 2 year old baot was developing stress cracks? Yes, with out a doubt. but does it look like major structural issue, not likely. I see a lot of boats(new ones) that have simular stress cracks, the common denominator in these boats is they are usually composite, higher peformace, upper middle line boats that use a lot of gel to get that diamond nonskid pattern. there are some that use the nonskid pattern with out the cracks, but they are geneally tanks(Whaler,Grady), that use their weight to an advantage. there are a lot of light weights out there that use paint, not gel to prevent visable cracks. Ive repaired a lot of boats that had cracks, and when I sanded them down to raw glass, i saw no signs of structual damage to the glass. When repaied tehm, i didn't lay a lot of gel on the repaired areas, and they usually didn't come back. just my .02