1983 44' Island Gypsy

Hello! Long time lurker, finally worked up to sharing our story and hopefully engaging more with the forum. These forums have already been invaluable to answering many questions and providing guidance just from reading everyone else’s adventures.

The wife and I purchased our 1983, Kong and Halvorsen, 44’ Island Gypsy now named Dewy Decimal, last fall and have been swamped with projects and travel since. This was a big step for us from our 5 year old 25’ Pontoon boat.

We are currently moored in Shelter Bay, La Conner, Washington and spent much of this summer traveling the San Juan’s.

Recently completed large projects have been a new Electronics, Generator and significant Engine cleanup (Injectors and Heat Exchangers).

This winter's projects include replacing the teak decking, refinishing rails and re-bedding or replacing windows.

Looking forward to continue to learn from everyone’s experience.

Welcome aboard and congrats on your new boat. Have fun with it.

It will be worth every torturous minute of sanding and scraping. And there will a lot of minutes!

Congratulations and Welcome Aboard. I admire your plan to repair and update. Will you be replacing any of the teak with fresh teak? Either way,if fortunate,the sandwich material in the fibreglass deck under the teak will be a foam type "board".

Thank you all for the well wishes!

BruceK said:

Congratulations and Welcome Aboard. I admire your plan to repair and update. Will you be replacing any of the teak with fresh teak? Either way,if fortunate,the sandwich material in the fibreglass deck under the teak will be a foam type "board".

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Currently we are leaning towards fiberglassing the decks and then installing an alternative decking over it like SeaDek. We are eager to get away from leaky decks as the current deck is leaking onto our bed and fiberglass seems to offer a more permanent fix.

We did buy the boat knowing that the there was a pile of projects to get to, but had hoped the decks would hold out a few more years. After we found the puddle on the bed it moved up the list and the boat is coming out of the water this week to get wrapped up for the winter while the deck is worked on.

Our last boat had fiberglass decks but had several areas that had coring replaced and had stress cracks in lots of places due to extra thick gel coat. We used Kiwigrip to refinish the decks after sanding off the non skid. It covers minor defects and is simple to apply and easy to repair if need be. If you remove the teak decks and glass the decks then Kiwigrip it will be a nice deck without all of the time intensive finishing of the glass. Also make sure the core isn’t wet before glassing the decks, that would be the time to replace any wet core if needed.

Comodave said:

Our last boat had fiberglass decks but had several areas that had coring replaced and had stress cracks in lots of places due to extra thick gel coat. We used Kiwigrip to refinish the decks after sanding off the non skid. It covers minor defects and is simple to apply and easy to repair if need be. If you remove the teak decks and glass the decks then Kiwigrip it will be a nice deck without all of the time intensive finishing of the glass. Also make sure the core isn’t wet before glassing the decks, that would be the time to replace any wet core if needed.

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Thank you for the Kiwigrip suggestion. We were planning to do something along those on the lower/forward walk around. I'll look more into Kiwigrip there as we have no need to keep the teak look and we want something low maintenance.

We do want to keep the teak look on the aft deck as we think it adds character and is very visible. That's where we are thinking of doing SeaDek or similar on top of the new fiberglass.

We do very much plan on drying everything out this winter. We are going to have it shrink wrapped (with room to work on it) after we pull it out. Once we pull the decks off we can then run some heat through it to dry everything out.