I've finally completed all the work I wanted to do on my C18. I sanded off all the PO's bottom paint and put on five coats of 2000E barrier coat. It was a lot of work and delayed launching by a month or more. After having done that I'm also thinking that it was a lot of work that may have been unnecessary. The bottom showed no sign of blistering and I think there has been some discussion that Catalina may have used a vinyl ester resin in the initial gelcoat or first lamination. I just can't remember that discussion. I bottomed painted with Interlux Micron CSC. With the bottom painting over the 2000E you have the choice of "hot coating" or sanding the barrier coat and then applying bottom paint. This "hot coating" is where you roll on a final coat of barrier and as soon as the barrier is dry to the touch you roll on your bottom paint. After having done all the work involved in the barrier coat I just didn't have it in me to sand the barrier. Sanding would have produced a very smooth hull but doing it as I did produced a smooth enough hull for this cruiser. Then it was on to the mast step. I pulled the mast step apart and looking down in the bolt holes I could detect some water saturated core. Under the mast step plate there was not a drop of bedding compound so small wonder the core would be wet. I cut through the top skin of fiberglass directly under the mast step to get a look at the core and sure enough it had significant moisture. Why Catalina builds boat with wood in this area is beyond me. A few square inches of solid fiberglass would totally eliminated the problem.When I was looking at the boat to buy I had a moisture meter and it showed moisture around the mast step but nowhere else. I removed the plywood core under the mast step and dug in under the top skin with a Dremel vibrating cut off saw to remove as much wet core as I could get at. Probing with a long thin screwdriver there seemed to be void areas with no core on each side of the mast step. I covered the mast step and let air get at it for several days and a lot of drying occurred. Then I epoxied in a couple layers of 1/8 inch plywood and glassed it over and laid the step in place covered with wax paper over some thickened epoxy. I oversized the holes for the mast step bolts and will epoxy the surrounding wood so that water will not come into contact with wood ever again. See the mast step pics attached.
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