It's been quite a while since I updated the blog, hasn't it? OK, here goes! In the Fall of 2021 and the early spring Spring of 2022, I spent most of my time getting the boats bottom ready for paint. This entailed a whole lot of pressure washing followed by a lot of scraping and sanding. Sanding ancient bottom paint is a nasty job. I wound up using quite a bit of Jasco paint remover, which is basically acetone in a gel suspension. If you get it on your hands, it burns. Parts of the trailer prevented me from accessing the entire bottom, but I got most of it. There was an old epoxy barrier coat below the waterline which was probably put on after the blisters had started. Anyway, after lots of sanding and drying out, filling blisters with underwater epoxy putty, and more sanding, I called that job DONE. In April of 2022, I started on the topsides. Step one was to sand off all the old paint and get down to gel coat. This took me about two weekends. Unfortunately I "dished" the gel coat a little bit with the disk sander, but not terribly. You have to get close and hunt for the dishes! I can't be too picky, after all, she's a 50+ year old boat and her owner isn't a multi-millionnaire!
Alpha got two coats of primer and I painted her with Petit EZ-Poxy in Sea Foam Green.
There she is with one coat of primer on, at the end of a busy workday, parked next to my EXTREMELY chatty neighbors $200 Venture 25. My time at the boat was limited since it was an hour and a quarters drive to get there, so I needed to make every minute count. He didn't seem to share my work ethic! It wasn't long before the coats of Sea Foam Green went on!
I actually applied all of this by roller and brush, by myself. The first coat turned into a suicide lake for about 1,000 little flies who dove into the paint in the stern quarter. So that had to be sanded off and done again. In the end, it looked really good.....a high quality 10 foot paint job. ...meaning that it looks great from 10 feet away!
Finally, Alpha got decals for her registration numbers and name...
She's looking good!