Swab the decks...er... paint!

Baby blue on a boat screams 1960-70. And even though our boat is 1972, it doesn't mean that we want her to look like that. Also the blue in the sunlight is a scorcher on barefeet. She needs a facelift. So, facelift we did. We went shopping for some deck paint. Mark had done some reading in "Practical Sailor" and found an article that graded the different types of non-skid deck paint. The one that was rated amongst the highest was Interdek paint. We ordered our 2 cans of grey online at westmarine.com. Once received I looked at the paint and decided it looked to be too dark. Of course Mark was not thrilled with this as it meant, more shopping and a return. I couldn't imagine putting 2 cans of grey on top of blue and getting something semi light. We decide on keeping one grey and getting a can of white to mix with it. The results were wonderful. We pressure washed the decks and then motored the boat over to Skeeko Bay on Flathead Lake. We taped off all of the areas that needed to be painted (previously baby blue) and then turned in for the night.

The nest morning we awoke, had our coffee and breakfast and got to work. I started by painting with about a 1 1/2" brush. The paint went on pretty easily but dried very quickly. It was almost gummy. The temperature that day was going to be 90 degrees so we had better work quickly. We started at 10:30am and finished at about 2:30. We spent the rest of the day swimming and admiring all of the other boats docked in the bay. Funny thing is, you look and want (oh they have such a better swim ladder, oh look at that solar panel, you get the idea).

We stayed the night in the bay again to let the paint dry before walking on it.

We awoke the following morning, to pick up co-worker and friend Krista, and set sail for a fun filled day. The paint was dry but would have been better left alone for another day. We had a lot of swimming.We made New Girl...on the dock to be           Pretty Girl...on the dock!



Left is blue ... right is grey.