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Paint, glorious paint!!

Today is a day that has been a long long time coming. We put paint on instead of sanding it off! It feels so good and the boat is looking wonderful without all her patchy, sanded bottom.

Here's the before pic



some of the prep - gave both hulls a complete scrub down, followed by a wipe down - with John finding and fixing a few more spots - then finally, MIXING UP THE PAINT!



and the after



It's only the first coat of many many coats that need to go on. And we did find a few spots we will need to sand and fix before the next coat, but it's putting paint ON instead of taking it OFF! It feels and looks so very good compared to how it did, and we feel like it is a huge step forward.

Barrier coat is what we painted today and will do several more coats of it before we move on. It's an epoxy paint that creates a water proof barrier between the fiberglass and the water. Once we are done with all of its coats, we will then apply the anti-foul paint. It's a paint that is designed to slow the growth of water flora and fauna on the bottom of the boat. Again, we will paint many coats of it. For these coats we will layer black and blue paint so we can monitor how quickly the paint wears down. The type of anti-foul paint we are using is called ablative. When we go in the water to clean the hull, while we are wiping or scraping anything that has started to grow, the paint will actually slowly wipe off, aiding in the removal of the marine growth. Once we start seeing the blue paint showing through the black, that's when we will know it is time to get the boat out of the water again and repaint it once more. It's a cycle that will repeat itself over and over as long as we have the boat. The difference will be that we won't be taking the paint off down to the fiberglass again - we hope! We will only have to redo the antifoul most of the time.

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