: I'm getting real close to joining deck to hull on my petrel and i'm
: getting anxious. I was wondering if I can skip a step by just
: coating hatch edges w/ epoxy instead of glassing them. Has
: anyone done this with good results or am I asking for trouble
: down the road?

Most of my boats have hatches that I did not cover the edges. They are basically fine. However, on almost every one of them, over time there is a little sign of water creeping into the deck and hatch cover along the cut edge, despite sealing the edges with epoxy.

I treat my boats fairly rough and don't always maintain them in the best manner. This is partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I want to learn how the boats die. From this testing I've decided that actively glassing over the edge does help. On customers boats, I now consider this best practice. For my own personal boats, I might not bother.

So, if you don't put epoxy over the edges, the hatches will be OK, but you can expect that as the boat ages, these edges may be one of the first places to show signs of that aging.