How to Git-Rot Gone Quick.

When you own a wooden boat you expect to have some soft spots, some wood rot, it's inevitable, you are wood on the water, it's gonna happen, you just hope and pray it's not on the bottom and in a spot easy to fix. Our boat came with some lovely soft spots that we need to address, wood rot is cancer to a boat, eats it up from the inside.

Thankfully the hull seems sound, but there were a few spots on the deck that had been compromised. These spots could have been avoided with some simple repairs, for instance, the areas around the trampoline areas in the stern, where one of the previous owners had drilled dozens of holes in the hull, we assume to attach trampolines at some point. However, there were no trampolines on Sweets and all these holes were just left open and unsealed. Of course water got in and the wood is rotten. 

This week we are determined to get trampolines installed which means we need to fix the rotten areas first. So do we cut out large patches of our boat and try to put in new wood and re fiberglass? That was the plan until we discovered this product called Git-Rot, it is a one starting epoxy that you squirt in through holes drilled halfway into the rotten wood, it spreads through all the soft spot til it reaches good wood and then solidifies, sounds worth a try. 

So above we drilled holes in through the top of the deck a few inches apart and only halfway into the wood, if we went all the way through the epoxy would run right out into the water.

Next we duct taped the bottom of the spots we were going to epoxy, there were some cracks in the fiberglass underneath.

There was only one small spot of deck that was actually soft to the touch but once we started tapping around the edges we could detect the hollow sound of rotten wood. When we started to drill we worked from the outside in and kept going until the drill hit good wood.

We bought the biggest jug available, it was $90 at Ace Hardware, but it does go quite a long way. You mix the epoxy and the hardener into the little squirt bottle and shake it up. The instructions said not to apply in hot temperatures, optimal was between 10 degrees and 21 degrees Celsius so we waited until dusk to do it. 

Once your bottle is all mixed up you begin pouring little drops into each of the holes you drilled. This was the fun part, time consuming but it was so cool to watch. The mixture fills up the hole and gets sucked down into the wood. You move from one to the next and keep adding more until each hole is full to the top and doesn't get sucked down. 

We were surprised at how it kept going, it took about an hour of constant filling and refilling before the holes started to remain full.

Left over night the Git-Rot was still tacky to touch the next morning and some of the holes had sunk down again. The next evening we reapplied another batch. The soft spot is starting to firm up and all that will be left once it is cured completely will be to sand down the top and fiberglass over the holes. So far it seems to be working just as advertised, but the real test will be how it holds up once we get the rear trampolines installed on them.