The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Six Warnings About Buying Fibreglass Boats

Here are six important things that Phyllis and I are taking into account as we think about buying a fibreglass boat.

And at least two of these warnings apply to the purchase of boats built from other materials, too.

Let’s dig in:


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More Articles From Online Book: How To Buy a Cruising Boat:

  1. The Right Way to Buy a Boat…And The Wrong Way
  2. Is It a Need or a Want?
  3. Buying a Boat—A Different Way To Think About Price
  4. Buying a Cruising Boat—Five Tips for The Half-Assed Option
  5. Are Refits Worth It?
  6. Buying a Boat—Never Say Never
  7. Selecting The Right Hull Form
  8. Five Ways That Bad Boats Happen
  9. How Weight Affects Boat Performance and Motion Comfort
  10. Easily Driven Boats Are Better
  11. 12 Tips To Avoid Ruining Our Easily Driven Sailboat
  12. Learn From The Designers
  13. You May Need a Bigger Boat Than You Think
  14. Sail Area: Overlap, Multihulls, And Racing Rules
  15. 8 Tips For a Great Cruising Boat Interior Arrangement
  16. Of Cockpits, Wheelhouses And Engine Rooms
  17. Offshore Sailboat Keel Types
  18. Cockpits—Part 1, Safe and Seamanlike
  19. Cockpits—Part 2, Visibility and Ergonomics
  20. Offshore Sailboat Winches, Selection and Positioning
  21. Choosing a Cruising Boat—Shelter
  22. Choosing A Cruising Boat—Shade and Ventilation
  23. Pitfalls to Avoid When Buying a New Voyaging Boat
  24. Cyclical Loading: Why Offshore Sailing Is So Hard On A Boat
  25. Cycle Loading—8 Tips for Boat and Gear Purchases
  26. Characteristics of Boat Building Materials
  27. Impact Resistance—How Hull Materials Respond to Impacts
  28. Impact Resistance—Two Collision Scenarios
  29. Hull Materials, Which Is Best?
  30. The Five Things We Need to Check When Buying a Boat
  31. Six Warnings About Buying Fibreglass Boats
  32. Buying a Fibreglass Boat—Hiring a Surveyor and Managing the Survey
  33. What We Need to Know About Moisture Meters and Wet Fibreglass Laminate
  34. US$30,000 Starter Cruiser—Part 1, How We Shopped For Our First Cruising Sailboat
  35. US$30,000 Starter Cruiser—Part 2, The Boat We Bought
  36. US$30,000 Starter Cruiser—How It’s Working Out
  37. Q&A, What’s the Maximum Sailboat Size For a Couple?
  38. At What Age should You Stop Sailing And Buy a Motorboat?
  39. A Motorsailer For Offshore Voyaging?
  40. The Two Biggest Lies Yacht Brokers Tell
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Richard Elder

Hi John
I’d put an exclamation point behind every sound comment you’ve made! And add a #7: Never buy a fiberglass boat with a full liner, regardless of whether it is bonded in with bearshit or a flexible adhesive like Plexius.

Perhaps we should add a #8: never buy a fiberglass boat that has the chainplates bolted in and covered with fiberglass to cause crevice corrosion .

And for me at least: never buy a boat with a cored hull unless it is built with epoxy resin.

Richard Elder

Hi John
See my note to Drew below:

Resin infusion with polyester? Why? Only because the bean counters told you to!
Now if the outer skin is as thick as a typical single skin boat and multi-layer epoxy barrier coat is applied underwater and is sufficient to prevent moisture penetration, the hull might remain sound over its lifetime. Is it a “good” resin infusion job? Not in my book.

Airex foam has a very low heat distortion temperature rating that can be reached in direct sunlight. As such it is not really suitable for decks, and hulls should not be painted blue or black if they are bound for the tropics.

Vinylester resin is “more” resistant to water penetration than polyester, and somewhat tougher. And a lot cheaper than epoxy. Exactly what that means requires more information than can be gleaned from a ASTM data sheet. “Trust but verify!” Is it suitable for balsa core infusion in hull bottoms? The more important question is: are the bean counters managing the company? Is this the last hull out of the door before bankruptcy? Or the first before the process has been refined? Do the court records show someone trying to hold the manufacturer liable for a failure?

Dick Stevenson

Hi John,
As one who had a LeComte Northeast 38 for 15+ years, I was intimately introduced to many of its shortcomings as it was bought as a complete insurance write-off. We made it into a wonderful coastal cruiser for my family with 3 children: but it took awhile.
That said, I will add one more general caveat: not every wonderful coastal cruiser, especially fg boats, will enjoy the transition into offshore passage making. Some of the problems you mentioned on our LeComte only appeared on a boisterous offshore passage to Bermuda. Others appeared as well and convinced us that, much as we loved her, she was not going to be the boat we would sail off into the sunset. Offshore is much rougher on a boat and reports of a boat’s performance and toughness coastal cruising may, in no way, reveal limitations that arise on a challenging ocean passage.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Neil McCubbin

Your distrust of venture capitalists is a good warning. The world is full of companies who make a fast buck by buying a top quality manufacturer then selling cheaply made product at high price. The frequent bankruptcies of boatbuilders make this field ripe for such scams. Even when the venture capitalist is in good faith, one has to wonder how he can do better than the original guy who built the reputation

Henry Rech

John,

If there was a chance, however small, of bashing, at hull speed, into a container floating around in a transatlantic shipping lane with your name on it, would you believe that a soundly built fibreglass boat would be strong enough to survive the collision?

Andrew Craig-Bennett

I’m not John. I run container ships, and in 40 odd years in the business no ship in a fleet managed by me has lost one over the side, so far.

To try to answer your question, containers are water perméable and will flood quickly. There’s a video of empties being blown into Hong Kong Harbour in the recent typhoon and sinking in a couple of minutes. The container will often stay barely awash if it contains goods packed in lots of Styrofoam. Since it is barely afloat it is hard to see but a sailing yacht’s forefoot will ride over it so some deceleration will occur before the keel contacts the container.

The forefoot is one of the stronger parts of the boat; whether the keel remains attached depends on all the factors that would apply to a grounding at similar speed but in this case some of the speed will have been lost as the forefoot rides up and over the container.

So yes, a typical GRP yacht stands a pretty good chance of coming out of an impact with a floating container still watertight and seaworthy enough to continue her passage.

Henry Rech

John,

Reading your comments above and others in your other articles in this vein it seems to me that whatever construction material you use, whether it is FG, steel, aluminium even ferrocement, the general admonition is to know your boats construction history and have it thoroughly surveyed. It seems to me all construction modes have their advantages and disadvantages and your preference is generally formulated around avoiding what you fear most.

Anyway, personally, I would not touch a FG boat to be used offshore unless it had 1″ at least thick solid lay up in the garboard and the bow area.

Philip Wilkie

“the general admonition is to know your boats construction history and have it thoroughly surveyed.”

Which can be a lot easier said than done. The survey we had done was for insurance purposes only; I damn well knew it wasn’t the whole story, and in the end I decided to rely on my own judgement. And once a boat has passed through several owners it’s impossible to tell truth from fiction.

Fortunately we found the original owners who had spent 13 years sailing our boat around the world and were able to visit them (after we had bought it). That gave us a lot more confidence that we hadn’t bought a total lemon.

Brent Cameron

Having sailed on lots of older boats but also having owned (and recently sold) an old Paceship, I get your point about old not necessarily being better – although my Paceship was built like he proverbial brick shit house. I had the occasion to use a hole saw to drill a 2” diameter hole through the hull for a speed/depth/temperature transducer and another 3/4” one near the rub rail for a bulge pump so I got to see exactly what it was made of. Not a whiff of chopped strand matting in either sample and the 2” one was almost 1-1/2” thick while the one near the rub rail was 3/4” thick. The resin was perfectly wetted and absolutely packed with cross directional matting. Having the unpleasant experience of running her aground not once but twice into a rock ledge in Georgian Bay (the second time at hull speed) and doing nothing more to it than denting the lead keel (and destroying my pride), I’d say to anyone that an old boat built right can be VERY strong but I’ve also seen many of that vintage or newer with mostly chopped strand matting that I wouldn’t touch with a 100’ pole. Walk around a marina and see where they haven’t put a stand against a bulkhead and you won’t sleep nights!

I’m in the market now for a good Amel Super Maramu or 54 and having crawled through dozens of them I can say that they are almost all very well built but it doesn’t take much for a bad owner to completely destroy the value in one as well. You know it is a strong boat when the manufacturer recommends lifting the boat in and out using the chain plates! Having sailed over 5000 miles in them up and down the Gulf Stream, I can say they take a real beating and don’t squeak and rattle even when REALLY pounding upwind.

That said there are a few really bad ones that should be sold for scrap because they were badly damaged and then shoddily fixed by yards with no ethics. One in particular (that is on the market now and pops up every few years) was blown off its cradle in a hurricane caving in one side and they simply glassed in a huge patch and didn’t properly tie it off to the bulkheads. The manufacturer said the only way to do it right was to put it back in the mold but they did it on the cradle and over course it isn’t true anymore. If that wasn’t bad enough they replaced all the rigging with something off another brand so destroyed the advantages. Some poor sod bought it and shortly after that ran it into a rock ledge that sliced the keel clean off it. Amazingly, it didn’t turn turtle or sink and they managed to get it to shore (thanks to the 5 watertight compartments I’m guessing). It was a write off again but somehow someone managed to buy a new keel for it but as they couldn’t lift it high enough in their boat house, they cut 6” off the bottom of the keel to make it fit! It’s out there for sale as not even the cheapest model hoping some other poor soul will think “it’s an Amel so it has to be good” just as you say.

John is exactly right on surveyors as well. I’d add that you should get a good surveyor who also knows the brand of the boat intimately (not the same thing has having surveyed them before). There are lots of surveyors that will say they know the boats but most will have no idea about the particular intricacies of the model and will call out things that are as designed and ignore flaming red flags. Also, I would add don’t get an “insurance survey”… they just care about valuing the boat and looking for obvious things to write in the report like expired fire extinguishers. It is your last chance to get stuff fixed at the prior owners expense (or deducted from the cost). Get a very thorough prepurchase survey that YOU pay for. On Amel’s the best surveyor used to be the QA guy at the Amel factory who did the final inspections and customer turnovers. He does a two day survey on a boat he know inside and out (and most likely recorded every single change to the boat). It costs money to fly him from France but he’s worth every penny as he will find things that could cost you several magnitudes of his cost that even very experienced boat owners might miss.

Great article.

Neil McCubbin

Paceships were built somewhat as a hobby by a company who was strong in industrial fibreglass. I bought some of their work. Quality and strength was way above the typical recreational boat.

Drew Frye

Two rather specific tips:

1. If there are fender washers backing ANYTHING up, check to see if they are bent into shallow cones. If they are, there is core damamge. 90% of the core damamge problems I have had to deal with was caused by thin fender washers being used as backing plates. The other 10 % was due to…

2. Poor wet-out on the inside of cored sections. I’ve owned boats that were vacuum bagged to economize on resin, with the end result that there were tiny, tiny pinholes in the laminate. Water gets in the core and it rots. There needs to be a resin-rich top coat, even on the inside.

I actually like cored boats (multihull guy), but attention to detail in the build and maintenance must be impeccable. I also think many should go solid in more keys areas than they do.

Richard Elder

Hi Drew
To elaborate on your #2;
The use of foam cores in fiberglass boat construction doesn’t mean everything is all peachy! I learned the hard way on my first large hull layup. We were using CoreCell (reputably the best available core material.) Vinylester resin, gell coat surface backed up by resin rich skin coat, Triax fiberglass, and core bedded into the recommended polyester based Core Bond putty under vacuum. Procedures were followed exactly as per written instructions and verbal instructions from the tech rep. The bond and core failure was so extreme that we caught it as soon as it came out of the mold. After a year in the courts we were eventually compensated.

Lesson: Core materials are inherently difficult to bond to. Secondary bonds are inherently weaker than primary bonds. Infuse it and use the best bonding resin possible: epoxy. And tent it so you can introduce enough heat to get the benefits of post cure strengthening and print-through resistance.