Touchup paint

As the proud new owner of a banana yellow '87 H17SE I have a bit of work ahead of me to make the boat presentable. It has a couple of fiberglass repairs that I would like use touch up paint to make less noticeable. But I don't see touch up paint in the Hobie catalog. Has anyone had any luck matching the color with an automotive shade? '69 Plymouth Barracuda yellow ?

if all you want is auto paint, tow the boat to the paint suplly store and they can scan the boat and mix an exact match. That way it will be "faded" (if applicable) the same amount.

There isn't touch-up paint because the boat's not painted to begin with. It's finished with a dyed polyester resin called gel coat.

Yellow is notoriously hard to match, especially on a 21 year-old boat that's seen a lot of sun. You can buy white gel coat at West Marine and yellow dye to mix / match.

If you want the boat all one color, you're probably better off painting the whole thing. Search the forum - there's a lot of threads on painting.

After 4 attempts with random bright yellow spray cans I have found that "chrome yellow" from Duplicolor is a remarkably good match to my H17.

I just cleaned up an yellow 18 that had some messy over-built up patches that I worked back down to the correct profile...fortunately the repairs were very solid just sticking up way above the normal hull exterior profile..When I was done I started with the off white gelcoat base that the guys who already posted referred to, and was sent some yellow pigment by an East Coast provider "Jamestown Supply"... that yellow would only produce a very bright unacceptable screaming yellow. Jamestown wanted like $10 for every color tint bottle...I was able to go to a local paint store and get some little red and yellow pigment samples for nothing. and you will only need a VERY small amount of these pigments even for a full quart of gelcoat.just to knock the color down to your faded yellow..by the way a quart of gelcoat will cover A LOT of hull repairs.
The problem you will run into, that everyone references is that the gel coat will be one color when it's wet,,another color when it dries. so is normal paint, but that's not the end of it..it will be a third color after it is worked down and buffed out..so it takes a lot of experimenting to finally get where you want to be with the color matching...
It may seem to be too much trouble to go to, but if you have more than just a few square inches of repair to do and match color on..you will actually save yourself a lot of time and effort by flipping the boat..
almost everyone is going to do some repair or build up on the centerline of the bottom or inside of the hulls under the tramp,and that's where you do all your first repairs, while you are dialing in your color...then if you don't quite get the color to match you have lots of chances to tweak as you move out to spots that anyone will ever see. A lot of repairs will take several layers of gelcoat and you can keep getting closer to color, as you do the buildups.
Paint is only microns thick,, the gelcoat layers and repairs are probably hundreds of times thicker and done properly will stay looking good a lot longer than any paint. It just takes a lot longer to wear through once in place...