Day 1 - of our Pacific Crossing has been spent cleaning the bottom of the hull.
If we do this we make the hull smoother and the boat far more efficient when underway and this makes travelling 4,000nm quicker and easier on the boat, you and your gear!
This is where we are anchored and we’ll spend the next day or two finishing off small jobs and waiting on a solid weather window to depart in.
Have to say it’s not a bad spot to do all the above in 🤙😊
Seems like a protected anchorage 👍🏻
What’s your technique and tools to clean the bottom of your hull?
For an antifoul we use copper coat which is a fantastic hard water based epoxy with copper dust in it. It’s good if you enjoy swimming and giving the bottom a scrub every month or so. Its hard and very smooth so is good for performance based boats as it gives the hull better efficiency through the water and the difference between it and an ablative is noticeable. We use plastic scrappers for anything hard and black foam sanding pads to give it a really good clean and to burnish the copper coat which helps reveal new copper to the environment and protection to the hull.
Previous owner of our boat just applied an ablative antifoul, but I will definitely look at copper coat for the next year! Does it last for years?!
Nice ablatives are also ok just depends upon what you enjoy doing. We love to swim and enjoy the exercise of giving the hull a wipe so it makes sense for us to go with CC. With a good 6-8 coatings you should be able to get ten + years out of CC.
Also, that’s a clean hull nice job 👍🏻
