If you have your boat in the water during the summer in Florida, don’t let a month go by without having the bottom cleaned. Barnacles grow all over the bottom of the boat. But, they also grow on the running gear, especially the prop. When your boat is feeling sluggish or the engine seems to be laboring more than normal, it just may be that the prop has a healthy amount of barnacles on it. This can happen is just three weeks in Florida.
If you dive down and take a peak, you can see how much growth there is. You would be really surprised. People sometimes try to get by for a couple of months without a bottom clean, and this may be okay on a freshly painted boat in winter, but the summer is another story. If you try to do that in the summer,you may find that your boat has little or no thrust, and lots of smoke from a laboring engine. Both are recipes for trouble.
During the summer, you are wise to have your boat cleaned twice a month. It is amazing how quickly they grow. Without a clean prop, boating is not that much fun.