PROJECT BOAT RESTORATION Hull & keel prep
After a season on the water and two years in a boatyard, Maximus’s antifouling was old and flaky. We’d been given the 28ft Maxi 84 by reader Daniel Kirtley, and one of the first things he suggested we do was scrape the paint back to the bare hull. Not a job to be taken lightly!
Arriving at Dell Quay in Chichester, we drove past rows of tightly packed boats, the first few sporting gleaming topsides and newly primed hulls, later ones flaking antifouling and old varnish. Some were missing masts, others missing keels. There was one keel without a boat that was periodically moved around the yard. Each week I’d wonder where I’d find it and if it would ever be reunited with its hull.
Maximus was about as far as you could drive without crashing into the tractor or the farmer’s field.
There’s a tacit understanding among boat owners that the further away from the slipway you’re placed, the less likely the yard thinks you’ll get afloat.
My neighbour Matt, the owner of a steel yacht built by his grandfather, was hopeful he’d be bumped up in the pecking order after being moved forward for a professional shotblast. Alas, he was promptly reunited with Maximus by the hedgerow. Not to worry, I had good company on the Fridays when we both worked on our boats.
From the top of the coachroof you could just about see the sun setting over the masts in Chichester harbour, and what a sight it was… it made the thought of those long days ahead worthwhile.
What the survey said
During the survey, our marine surveyor Ben Sutcliffe-Davies scraped off the antifouling in a few different places and noted that it was a classic case of mixed antifoulings that weren’t compatible with each other. The good news: they’ll be easy to scrape off. The bad news: like Daniel had said, we were going to have to scrape back to the epoxy.
“It doesn’t take a lot to get the initial product back,” said Ben, scraping away at it. “You’ve got the hard antifoul underneath and below that is the epoxy – a green and a grey, which is how they used to be designed to guarantee
