This week I’m back aboard good old Spiffy—our 44ft hurricane-damaged Antares 44 catamaran—and I wanted to give you a realistic look at what the next year of this channel might look like. The big win first: the temporary hatches I made have been a complete success, and we’ve got no more leaks. That’s huge. But we’re still in this weird transitional limbo: we moved up to North Carolina, and now Ava and I are trying to find a property where we can park the boat, get a roof over her, and actually get into the heavy refit work the logical way—gut the interior first and hunt down any hidden damage (because I already learned that lesson the Captain Dum Dum way on Athena). Then we get to the part the camera tries to hide: Spiffy’s gelcoat is cooked. We’re talking widespread crazing—tiny cracks basically everywhere the sun has hit—and it’s way beyond “buff it out.” I sanded into a hatch to check the laminate, and luckily the glass looks healthy, which is good news… but it still points to a truly massive exterior job. I called Andy from Boat Works Today to sanity-check my thinking, and we both keep coming back to the nuclear option: sand it back, lay a stabilizing layer of fiberglass over the surface, then fair and paint so it’s a one-and-done fix. Next week I’ll test cloth weights and epoxy vs polyester, and I’m also planning some smaller projects while we keep property-hunting.