Bottom Paint Life

[sailorboy1]

I feel this is a silly question for me to ask, but am going to risk it anyway.

I have multi-year ablative bottom paint on the boat. I applied a red layer on first then blue. Should I "assume" that until the paint gets down to red that blue paint is still active far as performance?

And paint performance is a useless measurement of whether it is still an active biocide to growth as stuff started growing on it the first month (expensive Seahawk top of line $$$$$$$ crap)

[rslifkin]

Provided the paint is actually wearing, yes, it should still be active until it's gone. The only exception seems to be some of the harder ablatives on a slow boat, where the paint may wear so little that it acts like hard paint.

[sailorboy1]

The bottom also gets cleaned once in a while exposing "good" paint. Not that it ever seems to experience slower growth after.

[tkeithlu]

Well, yeah, that's the way it works, but it appears that it's not releasing enough biocide to keep growth off your boat.

Sailorboy, what do you mean by "paint performance is a useless measurement?" that sentence sounds circular, since performance and releasing adequate biocide are the same thing.

Frustrating. Me too. My boat's coming out next week, with the "three-year bottom" applied by pros not getting anywhere near that time span. I have a suspicion that claims of bottom paint performance are like claims of solar panel performance - under ideal conditions, which in this case do not include warm water beasties.

[JPA Cate]

To some extent, the hard growth - when/if you get it where you are - provides a foothold for lots of other stuff. The soft slime antifouling should blow off if you go for sails frequently, and deny the hard stuff a chance to get started through it.

Basically it comes down to sailing frequently, or having the bottom cleaned. Some of the people who do that work will use a Go Pro or similar in order to show you the condition in which the bottom has been left after their spell cleaning the boat. If they clean reasonably gently, it can re-activate the still-good paint, which will go back to ablating when the boat is used. It is sitting stuck in marinas which is really hard on the paint, warm, still environment full of nutritious stuff: YUM! Not.

For me, it falls into the normally frustrating facts of life bin. Sorry, no good, cheap answer.

Ann

[RickG]

With ablative you gotta get out and sail to expose fresh biocide. With our Petit Trinidad SR we get great performance for six months and then we need to clean the bottom every month. Fresh paint every two years. In our high nutrient anchorage in the US Virgin Islands we get red algae and other soft growths with some barnacles. It all comes off easy.

We're having all the old paint removed and new barrier coat applied this summer. With the semi-hard paint, the copper gets used up but the epoxy substrate stays behind. We're going to get 18 years of old paint removed.

Cheers, RickG

[SVTatia]

Originally Posted by RickG

... We're going to get 18 years of old paint removed.

Cheers, RickG

Oh man, this is a lot of history thrown out...

Apologies for the drift... Will you be applying the same paint or going with something different?

[RickG]

We’re going with a proven performer, more Petit Trinidad SR. Our cruising grounds are prone to green algae at the waterline. The Island 44 outperforms, but we stay away from TBT.

Cheers, RickG