Hi Jeffborn. Welcome to the forum. It's really a lot better (long term) to clean and bleach your teak rather than sand it to get it clean in the first place.
Oxylic acid is the primary ingredient in most teak cleaners--it take out chemically induced darkening/blackening of the wood from iron compounds. Since there's a lot of iron compounds in dirt, it will help quite a bit. It doesn't remove the blackening of
rot, of course.
Teak is soft, so scrubbing at it or
sanding it takes away quite a bit of material very quickly. Better to bleach than remove materials. Once you've got it nice and clean, you can put on many coats of
varnish. You'll find that the varnish protects the teak very nicely. Get at least 6 to 8 coats on ad try to add 2 to 4 coats per year. When you add more
varnish, you will scrape or sand off the top coats until you get down to firm hard varnish. Then add your new coats. As long as you maintain with a few coats each year (or 2x per year if you've got the time for it), you'll not have to go down to bare wood for many years--possibly decades.
The
marinas aren't too thrilled with your sanding away at wood or varnish at the docks, no. We tend to do our varnishing at
anchor anyway because there are less lines to cross the covering boards and get in the way of the fresh varnish.
I hope this information is helpful to you. If you have teak decks, you won't varnish, you'll just clean them (and don't scrub hard as that takes away wood, too) with a cleaner that includes oxylic acid. We don't carry a teak cleaner or Oxylic acid at this time in the Schooner
Chandlery, but we do have
two different spar varnishes that you might like. I've personally used Behr Spar Varnish (can't get anymore), Captains, Schooner, and Epifanes.
Fair winds,
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