Painting Bottom
The bottom paint of our boat was in pretty rough shape. It loooked as though it had not been painted for years. We wante to get the bottom painted first because we figured it would be a lot easier than painting the topside.
We thought that the easiest way to paint the bottom would be to take the boat off the trailer and just ip it onto its side. With three guys pushing, we got the boat off, and turned it over so that it was leaning on two trees.
The existing bottom paint was just a blue chalky mess, so we sanded it down a little before painting. We did this on Saturday, October 18th, and it had gotten pretty cold the night before, so as we were sanding, we had melting water dripping down from the trees onto our boat causing a big mess with our sander. We had one guy keeping the boat dry with a rag as the other guy sanded. We just took turns sanding until we were sick of it and full of blue dust. John wore a dust mask because he was afraid of getting a little blue toxic dust in his lungs. I decided to take the dust like a man and ended up being sick the next day. We probably sanded for an hour or so. By that time it was about 11a.m. and 50 degrees, so it was just warm enough for us to paint.
After wiping off the excess dust with some paint thinner, we stirred up the Interlux Bottomkote paint we bought and started rolling it on. We were hoping to get by with one quart of Bottomkote, but we soon found out that that was not going to happen with how thick the paint went on, so we opened up the second quart and finished the job before it was noon. Two quarts was just enough to cover the bottom with one coat. By the time we went from one end of the boat to the other, the paint we first put on was already dry.
Just to be safe, we let the paint dry for about 5 or 6 hours and then rolled the boat back over and cranked it back onto the trailer (getting the boat on the trailer was much easier than taking it off).
Big suprise, Johnny is just standing around, telling Tom what to do.
