This week back aboard good old Spiffy—our 44 ft hurricane-damaged Antares 44 catamaran—I set up a couple of real-world gelcoat crazing experiments using the two sugar scoop hatch covers as test pieces. The goal was to figure out how to stabilize all those thousands of cracks without turning the entire deck into an endless festival of oh glorious sanding. I tested two workflows: epoxy with super lightweight twill, and polyester with chop strand mat (CSM). I also left the sides of the hatches mostly just keyed (not fully stripped) to see if that’ll come back to haunt me later—because if I can avoid sanding every square inch of deck, I absolutely will. The epoxy hatch was, frankly, buttery smooth and drama-free: quick wet-out, no bubbles, and no amine blush to worry about with TotalBoat’s high performance epoxy. The polyester hatch… well, Captain Dum Dum here learned that CSM does not automatically behave on tight radiuses, and I ended up with bubbles that forced an extra gelcoat-with-wax step just so I could sand properly. Even with my bias (I’ve got a decade of epoxy time and about a month with polyester), the epoxy route actually came out cheaper in this test and I still prefer it for secondary bond strength and as a moisture barrier. To round out the week, I started prepping for the upcoming water tank mess by emptying diesel, taking measurements, and confirming that removing the tank is going to involve some mildly terrifying surgery. And because I apparently can’t leave well enough alone, I also took a swing at silicon bronze sand casting—failed a Sail Life sign, but did manage a very respectable dinghy key copy. Next week: topcoat + soft sand nonskid tests, and then we start tearing into the tanks.