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My son and I are in the process of restoring our 1982 Whaler 11 Sport. You can see our progress so far on my personal page. The hull can be wet sanded and compounded to a great finish and we have a brand new set of woodwork from Nautical Lumber.
We have a lot of very fine small hairline cracks in the topside and deck gelcoat and a few longer "stress cracks" in the stern near the motor well. I am using a dremel type of tool to sand out the stress cracks and I will repair those with an epoxy compound - Interlux WaterTite. The other cracks are very small - you can see how small by comparing them to the dime in the pictures on my personal page. I really don't want to sand down the entire deck to the fiberglass matt underneath. We plan to paint the deck with Interlux Perfection (a two part paint.) After talking to Interlux, I am going to thin the first coat of primer so it will seal and fill the tiny cracks.
Has anyone had good success using this method with very fine gelcoat cracks? I realize that many will say I need to sand off the entire deck but that will add more hours to the project than the boat is worth. We want to prevent water from seeping between the hulls and make the boat presentable and fun.
I am also restoring an 11 ft Whaler (1976) with similar cracks. I agree with your approach as I am basically doing the same. For the deeper stress cracks, I routed them out down to glass, but filled them with Evercoat "non-mold-release" gelcoat. It's my first time working with gelcoat and I love the stuff. Dries smooth, hard and glossy. Easily sandable, too. For the spider cracks, I sanded the area flat as the cracks raise the gelcoat on either side of the crack (as I'm sure you know). I blew out / vacuumed the dust out of the cracks and squeegied gelcoat over the entire surface to get it as far into the crack as possible. Working pretty well.
I'll be using Interlux Pre-kote and Brightside paint so I don't waste unused, mixed two-part epoxy like when I did the bottom.
