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Old 05-12-2016, 03:53 PM   #34
BandB
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City: Fort Lauderdale. Florida, USA
Join Date: Jan 2014
Posts: 21,449
We haul out once a year. Our norm for bottom painting is every 3 years. Most around us do 2 years, but with our regular maintenance our bottoms even looked very good at 3 years. We refresh the Prop Speed annually. This is on top of regular bottom cleaning, which we have monthly or in the summer slightly more frequently. All bottom cleaning is done gently, no scraping. We also don't do any heavy cleaning at haul out, just our normal. We're in a very high growth area and find the regular maintenance saves on the major. So our annual haulouts are really for all the metal and to just get a very good look at everything.

Others will argue that it's cheaper just to do nothing in between and do bottom paint every two years. It may be close, but I don't think it's as good on the boat. Also, it's a path to not knowing when anodes need replacing or when other things might need attention. I believe if it requires hard scrubbing and scraping to clean your bottom, you don't have the right paint or you're not cleaning frequently enough.

Now, I recognize our frequency only applies to a small region and isn't at all applicable to where many of you boat. In fact, when we're not in our home area and we're using the boat daily, we are able to clean much less frequently. We're also very careful when getting someone different cleaning and give them the supplies to use and very firm instructions.

Now, the best tool for bottom care ever invented (ok, not best ever) we've found to be the GoPro and similar cameras. Obviously, if you're a diver, you can go check in person. Still it's nice to be able to just use a camera and see what is going on.
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