On 12/10/2010 6:26 AM, HarryK wrote:
On 12/9/10 10:16 PM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:37:45 -0500,
wrote:

My plan is to visit some of
the larger boat yards and see what they are using locally. Beyond that,
any recommendations?

There are plenty of good bottom paints offered in black. I've been
using Micron Ultra with fairly good results considering that the boat
is usually in semi tropical water 12 months of the year. We typically
go 2 full years before repainting although it clearly is starting to
lose some effectiveness towards the end. It didn't seem to work that
well in the Caribbean however. We had types of fouling that I'd
never seen before and it grew incredibly quickly.

I'd ask around with some of your local boat yard managers. They
usually have a pretty good idea what works well in your area. In any
case you'll probably want to have a diver clean the bottom every month
or two. It makes a big difference in speed and fuel burn, easily
paying for itself.

http://www.defender.com/product.jsp?path=-1|10918|296162|11000|311496|368288|586729&id=73825 7




Thanks for the advice. I'll check out the Micron. I like this line in
the description:

"This includes warmer waters with greater land runoff and slime-causing
algae."

I don't know if we have "warmer waters," but we sure have the runoff and
algae.


I use Petit Horizon in black. It is an ablative bottom coat and seems to
work pretty well. I don't know why I started using it, though. Probably
because some yard manager recommended it. Maybe they had a 500-gallon
barrel of it on hand? :)

Best advice has already been given, and that is to visit some boatyards
and ask questions. Bottom paint is not cheap.