Assuming its a fiberglass canoe, the most important thing to determine is the hull construction technique. Is it a chopper gun boat? You can tell that if the interior is very rough with no weave visible. Its basically short fiberglass fibers mixed with resin and sprayed with a spray gun. Or is it roven woven hull? Roven woven is a very course weave with the fiberglass strand being 1/16 to 1/8" in diameter with the weave spacing up to a quarter inch between strands. The final type of fiberglass hull is a laid up hull with woven fiberglass cloth in much smaller proportions.

If it is a laid up hull and you really like it, it may be worth it to you to rebuild it. If its is chopper gun or roven woven, think about it for awhile as both hull techniques leave millions of subsurface voids on the interior that have accumulated gunk over the years. This subsurface gunk will be impossible to remove which will cause serious bonding problems with the resin systems you will use to repair it. The interior patches may look like they bond, but they will end up delaminating after awhile. I also find that the chopper gun and roven woven boats tended to use cheap resin systems that were affected by UV damage even though they were colored. I suspect that after five years of UV exposure you can take a dull scraper and scrape right through the hull until you hit the exterior gelcoat. Your only hope would be to saturate this "rotten" glass with a low viscosity epoxy and try to fill the voids and stabilize the structure but the subsurface gunk would cause bonding problems.

How about using the technique in Gilpatricks book and pull some forms off of it and build a new hull using the old dimensions? it will end up a better boat

: I recently aquired a sixteen foot, midnight blue second-hand canoe from a
: friend. However, there are a few problems with this boat.

: Firstly, its been sitting in the water (not by my friend, who lent it to
: relatives) year-round for about five years. we get ice thick enough here
: to support several pickups and a dozen ice-fishers easily.

: After scrubbing the algae and dirt off (I wouldn't have been suprised to find
: freshwater barnacles), the canoe was discoloured and cracked in several
: places along the hull, running alongside the keel. That's also the first
: time I've seen a waterline INSIDE a boat. The seats, and the bar that
: crosses the middle of the canoe (forget the term) are gone, though the
: places where they attached to the canoe are still there. On one side, the
: gunwell has popped off, and the rivets holding the gunwells down are
: rusted out. One deck also fell off in my hand as I tried to move the
: canoe. Personally, I don't care if its worth it, I want to restore this
: canoe. I'm thinking perhaps a new layer of fibreglass over top (and
: inside) will do it, but I'm not sure how to go about it. Do I sand the
: canoe down first? also, is there a way to restore the canoe's colour (its
: badly discoloured and scratched)?

: Much appreciated, I'm also researching here, but I'm not finding much.

: Knightmare