St. Maarten haul out and paint job

Last week was totally miserable, lets be honest – nobody likes yard time when living on a boat.

The (waay) cheaper option is to live onboard while you’re hauled out, which is totally do-able and not that bad if you’re just a couple with no kids. When you add kids, a tall unstable ladder, toxic dirt and loud power tools, it’s a recipe for disaster.

We sucked it up and rented a hotel apartment for 10 days which we ended up having to move to another hotel after for an extra 3 nights because of the sand blasting debacle.

Here’s the run down. We needed to get the hull (under the waterline) blasted to remove a year + of barnacles so we thought we might as well get the rest of the hull blasted and bring her down to an aluminum hull – Carl’s dream.

We started blasting at the bow and it revealed 1.5 inches of fairing (filler used in the production of the boat) under the paint, the blasting would literally take FOREVER and bleed our bank account dry revealing an imperfect hull.

– you build a aluminum boat that either is going to be painted or left raw. The painted ones get faired and painted and the raw hulled ones are made sure their hull is perfect without the use of fairing. Both options produce the same strength boat, just one has paint and the other doesn’t. So we got the painted version that needs to be kept, the painted version –

No biggy, a bare aluminum hull is just personal preference.

Well we all made the trip to the marine store here in St. Maarten to check out our “in stock” paint options. We were limited on time and didn’t want to wait for paint to be ordered because that would mean more time at a hotel.

We couldn’t all agree on the color. Crew wanted black, Capri wanted Capri blue, Cali wanted ice blue, I wanted yellow and well Carl just wanted us to make a decision.

Here we have it. The yellow side is mine and the blue side is the kids. Rolled and hand painted by Carl. All happy.