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Many thanks to you all for your comments.

If the cracks are purely cosmetic, I'm inclined to just keep the polish up to them and that's it. Is that what other owners with this problem are doing?

As for the Magicezy suggestion, I would be worried about colour matching but more so, I've too many cracks. However I see they have a filler for small accidents, so that is useful info. Magicezy have a store here in Australia, so easy to get the product.

Thanks again,
Derek

I have a Catalina 34 Mark II hull #1801 launched in 2008 in Sydney Australia. For the last two years or so I've noticed hairline cracks developing in the deck gelcoat but not in the nonslip areas (see attached photo).  I've been applying polish to these areas. There doesn't seem to any water penetration.

The original owner had the boat on a marina with covers for seven years. I have owned the boat on a swing mooring for nine years with no cover.

There doesn't seem to have been any discussion of this problem for some years. As far as I can tell, it appears my problem may be cosmetic rather than needing repairs (rub back of cracks and new coat of gelcoat which would be quite expensive).

Any comments?

Thanks everyone for your advise and comments.

Being a relatively new boat owner, I don't have much experience and I was accepting my mechanic's advice that the cable was adjusted as good as it could be. Today I checked the travel of the shift lever and found it only moved 29 mm in forward and 40  mm in reverse whereas it should be 35 mm at least in both directions. No wonder I'm having trouble getting into forward! So that's obviously the first thing that needs to be done before any work is done on the gearbox.

Thanks again!

I too have problems shifting into forward gear. When coming off the mooring, it takes four attempts before I'm successful, that is I push into forward gear, wait a bit, then a little accelerator, but nothing then back to neutral and try again.

I've had my boat (C34 Mark II #1801) about eighteen months. When I bought it, the Edson shift lever was hitting against the pedestal guard tube. Last September I replaced the original two lever system with an Edson single lever side mounted engine control.Now the lever doesn't hit anything.

My mechanic says he's adjusted the cable as much as possible and that now the gearbox needs to be pulled out and overhauled, in particular the shift selector.The only thing that makes me question this advice is that once I've been motoring for a while, say fifteen minutes, and I take it out of gear, it will go into gear on the first attempt every time. This may be a co-incidence or it may be related to the gearbox warming up. I would have thought that if the problem was cable adjustment, the problem would remain regardless of how long the engine had been running. The engine (M-35B) only has about 260 hours on it, so the gearbox should not be too worn.

Does anyone have any suggestions on solving this problem?

Thanks