...Next week I am going to have it professionaly sandblasted and we'll see whats left. Between now and then I have to research what would be best to fill the heavily pitted areas to fair the keel.... Sean, Glad to hear you got the keel out all right. For repair ideas you might want to go to the website WWW.MSOG.ORG and look through the old messages. There is a pretty good search engine there. I think I remember a note from Jerry Montgomery on techniques for fairing and repairing a rusty keel. As I remember he suggested (after it was blasted clean) to paint it with epoxy and scrub through the wet epoxy with a steel brush to help it bond. Then you can fair it with a paste of epoxy and micro-balloons and finally put another coat of clear epoxy over the faired keel to seal it. Then bottom paint of your choice. Good luck John Roland M-15 Wokini