AS K N IGE L BY NIGEL BARRON
Bottom of the Question When is it time? What’s the best? Ablative or hard? NIGEL BARRON answers all your queries about bottom paint. One of the more common questions I get from friends and customers is: What is the best bottom paint for my boat and how do I know if it’s time for paint? Like everything on boats, there is no one answer. It really depends on what you’re going to do with your boat, where you keep it, and how often you use it or have a diver clean it. Let’s start with the basics. There are really two categories of paint— ablative and hard. Within those categories, there are a multitude of options at a wide variety of price points. An ablative paint is the type that sluffs off with use as the boat moves through the water. A hard paint requires some more maintenance in the sense of cleaning. One important piece of information related to these types of paint: you can put ablative over hard, but not hard over ablative. As the paint is intended to sluff off, if you put the hard over it’s just going to fall off. So how do you know if it’s time? For the most part, boats are seeming to get two to three years in saltwater out of the bottom paint and five to seven years in freshwater. There are a couple of easy ways to tell if you need paint. If you have a hard paint and have a diver clean the bottom, they’re usually pretty good about telling you the condition of the paint. For Zvi, Ben Bottoms wipes the bottom before every race. I know it’s time to get bottom paint when I hear that it’s taking longer to get the bottom clean. With an ablative paint, lots of people will use two different colored paints so you have a guide coat to see when the paint is getting thin. Growth on the waterline is a pretty good sign too. Among the ablative paints, Seahawks Cukote and Interlux Micron CSC are some of the more common and are priced quite similarly. Both afford multi-season protection, and both are self-polishing when the boat is underway. Hard paints, or modified epoxy paints offer the same sorts of protections against marine growth that the ablative paints do, but require a bit more maintenance in the water. Because they aren’t self-polishing, you’ll need a diver to clean the bottom. 68
For either type of paint, the difference in cost per gallon really comes down to the amount of copper. When you think about it, that’s the commodity driving the price. We’re fortunate in our waters to not really be a high growth area because the water just doesn’t get that warm. Trinidad, as you would expect with a place so close to the equator, requires a high copper paint for high fouling areas. For the most part, at 65% copper, it’s really overkill for our area. Because our waters will vary from marina to marina, ask people what they are using and if they’re happy with it. Ask the boatyard where you take your boat what paints they recommend. If you race your boat, chances are you have a hard paint. Hard paints such as Baltoplate can be burnished to 1000 grit to give a nice smooth finish. For the best finish for a race boat you would really want to spray the paint as you get a bit more material on the boat and end up with a smoother finish before you start to burnish it. Baltoplate is not the best anti-fouling paint by any stretch, but racers have a higher tolerance for paying divers, so things stay pretty clean. Another important piece to consider when thinking about paint is the running gear. Be it a sailboat or a powerboat, there is metal underwater that needs coatings and to be protected. Here at CSR, we have moved away from using the spray cans of “barnacle blockers” in lieu of PropSpeed. While the PropSpeed is more expensive, we have found that unlike the spray cans, it will last until the next haulout. Nigel Barron was born in England and developed his sea legs at an early age. He is currently the project manager at CSR Marine in Seattle, where he has worked for 15 years, first as a rigger, then an installer, and now in his current role. He is also the captain of Zvi, a Reichel-Pugh designed and McConaghy-built custom race boat from Seattle.
