20ft Fiberglass Sea Skiff- the Saga Begins

Hello to all;

I'm a new member of the Commander site and recently acquired the Chris Craft Sea Skiff Paul Plechter has been watching for awhile on E-Bay. I wrote Paul privately and have spoken by phone with him and think we have started what I hope will be a long friendship. I live in Harper Woods, MI about 5 miles from where this skiff, hull #GUA200012N, was languishing in a well in the Grosse Pointe Woods MI waterfront park. The boat has about 780hrs showing on the meter and has an original Chris Craft 327F in the engine bay.

It starts up and runs good but I haven't even had a ride in it yet as I was up to my eyeballs selling a 17ft Com-Pac sailboat, trying to get the Chris Craft ready for a Michigan winter and figuring out where and how to store it. At a bit over 8ft high on the trailer it will not clear either my 7ft high door on the garage at our summer home in Garden Michigan in the UP or my fiancee's 8ft door in Port Huron Michigan. Also the bottom of the boat was totally encrusted with baby zebra mussels just to add to the fun. I wound up winterizing the engine on the trailer in the driveway in Port Huron, cleaning the bilge, then took the boat to a local marina where they took it off the trailer and acid washed the bottom 3 times to get it clean. Then it was off to a friend's in Goodells, Michigan to be stored for a few days until the sailboat was picked up by a new owner from Colorado which freed up the garage in Port Huron.

My fiancee know's the way to a man's heart is throught the garage door so she generously offered to let me store the boat and work on it in her garage in Port Huron. Once the sailboat was gone I towed the skiff back to her house and removed the windshield and put it into the garage. So, the hull is basically sound, the machinery is runnable but the boat shows it age and needs a lot to make it right. The original front seats and steering wheel are gone. The wiring is a fright because of the numerous pieces of electrical gear that has been added over the years. Previous owners had no respect for the originality of the boat and have drilled a ton of holes on topside glass to mount compasses, radios, fish finders, planer board mounts, rod holders and on and on.

I have spent a couple of days removing all this stuff including all the gunwale canvas snaps since the cnavas will be replaced and am now starting to fill every hole with Smooth-On military spec white epoxy. I got the port gunwale done today and patched a 5inch long fracure/gouge in the gelcoat where the chine meets the transom. If I'm real ambitious I will go back to Port Huron tomorrow and do the starbord side and the dash. Once the rough repairs are done I will dimple all the repair sites and apply Evercoat gelcoat repair to all the sites. For now the poor thing looks like someone put band-aids on a drive-by shooting victim as there is a piece of green masking tape over each hole to form the epoxy. Here are a few pictures.

Dave






















Edit comment: old photo links deleted, new archived photos of Dave's project have been added to this post. Paul