Florida Water

Just wondering if leaving our boat in the water down here for like a week will leave the gel-coat looking rough or damage it... in Wisconsin our last boat had the gel-coat bubble after just sittin in water for a week or two.

does anyone let their boat just sit? and does it come out fine?
Thx

my boat sits in our lake for months on end and looks fine every time I take it out to wash it. With that said there are several lakes you couldn't do that on.

would you say winterset will be okay for it? it will only be for a week or so... and they say thats the cleanest of the winter haven chain

depends on the lake.

If your boat is in crystal clear water, like the Butler Chain in Orlando, you will not see anything on the hull.

If it is in a lake that is brown from tannic acid like the Clermont chain, your hull will get discolored in one day.

If you can see the bottom of the lake in 6 feet of water, you should have no problem.

I live on the Clermont Chain. I do not keep the boat in the water and I have to wash the white hull everytime I use the boat.

Little spray of Fantastic or 409 melts the brown away.

discoloration comes from the water.

the "bubbles" come from water intrusion (as a function of soak time rather than water type) into small voids under the gelcoat that stem from resin being of poor quality or improperly mixed, glass being incompletely wetted or improperly rolled. It's not all that uncommon. bad news is that many skiboat manufacturers will not warranty gel coat blistering/bubbling.

What age said. We have the same h2o here in FL as they do in Wisconsin, all water is the same, just some is dirtier then others. The bubbles are not caused by dirt, but by intrusion, like age said, and that is a fx of your boat, not the water. However, it is my understanding that the longer you keep the boat in the water, and the warmer the water is, the more likely this is to occur. But for one week I could not imagine an issue. It is a boat after all.

LOL! The brown coloring of our lakes is NOT caused by dirt.

Brown color comes from two main sources:

1. tannic acid leeching from cypress trees -especially from their massive, submerged root systems.

2. surface water (not spring water or water in sink holes)that flows (north or south) thru swamps and gets filtered by vegetation.

If it was caused by dirt, at some point the dirt would settle to the bottom and the water would be clear.

And that tannic color keeps the lake a little warmer too.