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I was looking at another thread and wound up on Kamie's website. A picture of her Outrage jogged my memory about something that perplexed me when I was taking my deck off but I forgot about it as the project rolled on. The question is about these rectangular areas that look to be sunken into the glass around them and many of them had cracked gelcoat all around them like the picture below. I also have the same type of sunken holes but circular which also seemed damaged when my deck came off. My thought was that it was were the inside of the boat was secured to a mold as they lowered it into the hull and then broke it free when they were sandwiched together. Does anyone know for sure what these are?

P.S. If the photo doesn't show up in the post it can be accessed from the main page on my photobucket below:

http://tinyurl.com/325udx

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What boat are you talking about? Where on the boat is the area in question?

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Those are just tooling marks from where whaler would piece the molds together. For the deck side of the mold it was made from two parts. One tool was for the deck the other was for the fuel tank cavity. They screwed those tools together to create the one piece deck section and what you are seeing it the marks left form the fastening areas.

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Tom,
They are located under the tank cover near edge. In a lot of cases the gelcoat is thin, cracked or non-existant and on my Outrage these spots provided a way for water to reach the foam, espcially when the screws holding the tank cover went down thru the middle.

I suspected they were for clamps of some type. I filled and sealed mine with Marine-Tex before I put the tank cover back down.