Oscoda Canoe

[James L]

One additional thought, though it will cosmetically muck up what seems to be a nice canoe in good shape. If you want to brush up the canoe, you can add some light to medium bungee cord a few inches below the gunwales. If that's supported with an eyelet or some other hardware every 12-18", you can put bundles of natural cover under the bungee and have them extend over the gunwales. It won't make much different when you are paddling, but if you ever sit in the canoe in or near natural cover, it's surprising how much even pretty sparse grassing breaks up the visibility of the boat. And it you want to screw up that nice gel coat, too, I've used rattlecan matte camo spray paint. (I like the Krylon Fusion, but I'm spraying Royalex canoes so need it to adhere to plastic. Start with a dark base coat of brown or olive, add some small darker splotches of black, and then improvise some stencils to apply some sparse lighter highlights that match your local cover. You can get very artsy with this or spend a lot of money on custom stencils, but you can simply cut stencils of our cereal boxes to good effect. I wouldn't bother with anything but trying to mute the shine if you just plan to jump shoot.

Yep I think I will need to cut the shine down some way or other, thanks for the suggestions. The gel coat looks good from further back but up close it shows it's age a bit, it has some very minor cracking. Not sure what the technical boat term would be for what's going on. I assume it's just the gel coat, I'm not seeing any issues with the fiberglass from the inside and generally seems sound, and I don't think the gel coat is going to flake off any time soon.

It does make me wonder if I was going to go the paint route what the best prep steps would be - try to remove some of the outer most layers or just clean it, lightly scuff it then prime/paint? I'm not too worried about having a professional looking paint job but would be annoying to have it start flaking off.

No solid plans on anything yet, I'll have to see what time allows this spring/summer. Thinking maybe try the bungee and netting plus grass/branches approach first and see how bad any shine comes through.