After giving the hulls of Little Cat an initial scrub during my summer adventure in the Bay, it was time to put on some new bottom paint. Who can afford the $1,000+ it would cost to get the job done in a Bay boatyard (rhetorical question) - no one I know. So its the old-fashioned way, drying the boat between the tides and getting the paint on before the water comes back in (as a boy, I did this many times with my Dad on his keel boat).
Hard work! Bottom scrub until clean while the tide is dropping, sand with 80 grit, put on a coat of paint - all in the 4-5 hours before the water is lapping at the bottom of the hulls again.
One benefit was that I got a good inspection of the nice job the boat's builder did of the copper keel strip that runs the full length of each hull.
Unfortunately, on my own its only possible to do one coat in this time, so will have to go through the whole process again soon to get two coats of paint. Antifouling is toxic, so I went to some trouble to pick up all of detritus and to drop as little paint as possible.
Hard work! Bottom scrub until clean while the tide is dropping, sand with 80 grit, put on a coat of paint - all in the 4-5 hours before the water is lapping at the bottom of the hulls again.
One benefit was that I got a good inspection of the nice job the boat's builder did of the copper keel strip that runs the full length of each hull.
Unfortunately, on my own its only possible to do one coat in this time, so will have to go through the whole process again soon to get two coats of paint. Antifouling is toxic, so I went to some trouble to pick up all of detritus and to drop as little paint as possible.
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