Getting your bottom painted with anti-fouling paint is an important part of boat maintenance. Bottom paint that works well can save on fuel and improve boat performance and make it more fun to go boating. Poor bottom paint can be aggravating and lead to extra maintenance cost. With that in mind, how do you ensure you get the best out of your bottom paint job? Well, unfortunately, there is not go to yard or paint type that is guaranteed to work great for your boat.
From our experience, bottom paint jobs are a hit and miss proposition. The same paint can work great on one boat and not so great on another. The same goes for the yard doing the job. Sometime the results are excellent and sometimes not. I know this is not what you want to hear, but this is the conclusion we have come to after years of cleaning boat bottoms.
The best advice we can give for boat owners who are getting their bottoms painted is to monitor the performance of the bottom paint carefully after the boat comes back from the yard. If there is a problem, do not hesitate to take the boat back to the yard to have it repainted. If you let a poor bottom job slide, you may have to live for years with excessive barnacle growth and poor on-the-water performance. Your boat is too important to let that happen!