Sustainable Sailing

Some eagle eyed people might have spotted a new toy in the back of our van in the last post.

Recently we were looking at the most environmentally safe way to remove the old anti-fouling paint. What we found is Peelaway Marine which sounds a lot better than the most common DIY methods of sanding/scraping which are both incredibly time consuming and also create lots of waste either as toxic dust or loose shavings. The professional method is to use some form of sandblasting and in theory it should be done inside and properly collected. However, walking around our boat and the yard it is obvious that in the past lots of antifouling has simply ended up in the gravel.

The Peelaway Marine product is particularly attractive as it comes with a “blanket” that you cover the paste with after application. The waste then comes away attached to the blanket. This seems better than other chemical solvents we have seen which still create a lot of mess.

As we were looking at this it was clear that applying it with an airless spray gun was going to be a huge time saver as well as doing a better and more economical job.

If you remember way back to January when I wrote about Anti-fouling paint the most environmentally friendly option seems to be SeaCoat SEA-SPEED V 10 X, however, that needs to be applied by spray.

When we added up all the painting that we need to do:

• Anti-fouling removal paste
• Anti-fouling
• Lots more sections of the bilges
• interior woodwork
• deck
• topsides we decided to be more honest and realistic with ourselves and recognise that the topsides (sides of the boat above the water) really are going to need to be painted, they are too old for a clean and polish to be enough

and considered our poor painting skills and time constraints we decided that it was worth buying an airless spray before doing any of the work (and especially better than doing lots of painting without one and then finding it is essential for the Sea-speed or the topsides).

Besides the speed and quality there are a couple of other advantages for us:

• We have lots of painting where access is tricky or you need to keep moving platforms to stand on. So the potential to use an extension wand is very attractive as is less need to squeeze into the tightest depths.
• Some of the paint isn’t very nice stuff. These keeps us much cleaner and separated from it during the process so safer for us.

We know nothing about these but some research led us to Wagner HEA products as being much cheaper than the typical commercial products. In the end we decided to go for their more powerful 350M product due to the wide variation in viscosity of the paints we need. We got it from https://www.paintsprayer.co.uk/

The fact that you simply dunk the hose in your can of paint and then get painting was attractive as a way of reducing mess and waste. Even the small amount of paint that ends up being flushed out is reasonable given that you waste quite a bit with paint trays, rollers and brushes. We will just need to get organised to paint as much as possible each time we load it up.

Hopefully over the next few years we will feel that we will get good value for money from this (we will also be able to use it for our sons home so it will get other uses too).

We will let you know how we find it.