Glecoat Crazing

[camndon]

We are original owners of a 1981 Gulfstar Sailmaster 39. I started noticiing cracking/crazing (almost looks like "flaking" but it doesn''t flake) on flat surfaces on the deck (not the non-skid) about three years ago. The first spots were over the foc''sl area. I now have more--mostly on top of the cabin around the mast. None to speak of aft of the mast and none on anything but horizontal surfaces. Two years ago I got two estimates from Seattle boat yards. In very round numbers, they wanted about 20-25 grand--if I removed and replaced all the hardware... The fix was to mask off all the non-skid with something like strips of thin aluminum so they could grind/sand away all the white gel without messing up the non-skid. Then they would paint it. Since I had some crazing in my topsides as well (about a six foot area amidships) and since the black Awlgrip was now thirteen years old, I decided to just get the topsides repaired and repainted. The advice is that crazing is only a cosmetic problem so I decided to live with the decks for now--especially after paying almost 20 grand for a new set of topsides (the crazing was a lot more extensive than we originally thought.) Have others had experiences with gelcoat "crazing?"