BOAT ANGLER
Words and photography by DAVE BARHAM
SCRAPE AND SPRAY
STEP-BY-STEP
March is a good time to carry out annual boat maintenance. Dave Barham explains the importance of removing barnacles from the hull of your boat
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or boat owners who keep their vessels on permanent moorings or berths in a marina, the first lift out of the season can be a daunting task. What’s more, the sight of hundreds of tiny barnacles, which have made the hull of your vessel their home, can be worrying, to say the least. Don’t panic; it’s never as bad as it looks, and if you keep on top of it by lifting, scraping, and spraying them away every year you should have nothing to worry about. However, leave your boat in the water, and the barnacles to their own devices, at your peril.
LIFTING OUT You should always get you boat lifted out each year,
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even if it’s just an annual check to make sure the underside is sound and undamaged. Sometimes it’s easy enough to take your boat out of the water yourself if it’s small enough. Rather like launching and retrieving, you can remove your boat from its mooring with a slipway and trailer. If you don’t have a trailer or your boat is too large, then it’s s a relatively easy process to get lifted by professionals at the marina.
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BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES Once lifted, you’ll need to hop aboard and make sure that all the
doors, windows and hatches (if your boat has a closed cabin) are sealed tight. The last thing you want is for dirty water to get sprayed all over the inside of cabin.
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SCRAPE AWAY Removing the weed and barnacles is purely down to elbow grease.
WHAT A MESS! Even if you use your boat regularly, there will still be some sort
build up of weed and barnacles. This is my mate Roger’s old boat and we went out on her at least once every two weeks, often cruising along at 20+ knots. Look how much growth there is on her hull. 66
66-67 SMALL BOAT 607.indd 66
You can use a dedicated scraper, which is a hard plastic or blunt metal blade on a stick, rather like a garden hoe. Start at one end and scrape away the barnacles, working your way all around the hull of the boat. In most cases you will find that there are patches of barnacles, which tend to colonise in groups, and unless you’ve left your boat in the water for too long, removal by scraping shouldn’t be too hard a job.
SEA ANGLER ISSUE 607
17/02/2022 13:18
