Bottom Renewal

Our primary reason for this fall's haul out was to have a total bottom renewal.  Here's the before:

Immediately after hauling out and removing the centerboard the yard sandblasted the bottom, removing EVERYTHING and blowing sand into the shaft log and all the thru-hulls.

I worked on getting unwanted sand out of these places as Santos (our main worker) started grinding the bottom down to bare fiberglass. The most-used power tool in the third world boatyards is the 4-1/2” angle grinder, and they are really good with it here. We had a couple of unused senders which I removed for filling in as well. The bottom had a lot of small blisters, mainly at the waterline, but there had been several poor “repairs” in the past, especially on the rudder, which needed to be repaired.  The last antifouling was Sea Hawk Islands 44+ ablative in 2013 at Shelter Bay Marina, Colon, Panama. After 6 months the paint had washed off the waterline, the stem, the rudder, the keel, etc. It needed to come off. I'll never use that paint again. We found a “stripe” of different resin from stem to keel, which no one to date has been able to identify. Santos put an extra layer of mat over parts of the stripe where the glass looked “iffy”.

"Stripe"

Stripe Repair
After the grinding, patching, and then sanding the bottom, it was washed down with acetone and Santos painted 4 coats of epoxy onto it.

Next was a light sanding to remove the amine blush and prepare it for the epoxy primer.

Step 6 was to put 3 coats of Petit epoxy primer on the bottom, and finally we put on 2 coats of Petit Trinidad antifouling. We raised the waterline to the level of the top boot stripe to keep the growth off the waterline during long passages when we are heeled.

This entire process took 8 weeks, with a third of that time lost to rain or the guys working on other boats.