Fixing the soft spot

I hate the baby blue color of this hobie. I knew from the beginning that I was going to repaint the boat, so this didn't concern me. I was more concerned with the integrity of the hull, which was generally good except for the soft spot on the starboard hull.

To fix the softspot, I went with the method suggested by Hobie to inject epoxy resin between the layers of the fiberglass. Having never really worked with fiberglass, I didn't really appreciate what I was in for. Seemed simple enough.

I bought a couple of small syringes and a can of resin. I drilled several small holes into the soft spot area. I may two mistakes. First, I mixed in too much hardener. Second, I didn't really think about how I was going to get the epoxy into the syringe. This turned out to be really messy and difficult. It got more messy when I dropped the cup of epoxy on over the hull and onto the ground. Naturally, this all landed smack on top a sprinkler head, gumming that whole thing up permanently. Of course, the syringe started to gum up as well too quickly do to the fact I'd put in too much hardener. My hands and feet got covered in epoxy.

My second attempt went better. I ended up injecting resin all around the soft spot, instead of just in a single area. It seems to have worked well, as most of this area is now rock hard.

I patched the holes I drilled with epoxy putty. The epoxy I spilled on the hull got taken care of with some sanding using 120 grit with a rotary sander. Because I'm going to repaint, I'm not concerned about matching color on the putty.