SCRAPE AND SPRAY

SCRAPE STEP-BY-STEP AND SPRAY AND SPRAY

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

For boat owners who keep their vessels on permanent moorings or berths in a marina, the fi rst 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.

1 LIFTING OUT

You should always get you boat lifted out each year, 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. e last thing you want is for dirty water to get sprayed all over the inside of cabin.

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WHAT A MESS!

Even if you use your boat regularly, there will still be some sort build up of weed and barnacles. is 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.

SCRAPE AWAY

Removing the weed and barnacles is purely down to elbow grease. 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 fi nd 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.

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LOTS OF MESS

is is a job to be done at the marina rather than at home. e debris from clusters of barnacles and associated weed clumps is messy. It’s amazing how many barnacles attach themselves to the underside of your boat throughout the course of the year.

6 TAKE YOUR TIME

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is is not a job to be rushed. Take your time and make sure you get into all the nooks and crannies – especially around the engine mounts (if you’re running outboards) and prop shaft (if it’s an inboard). You’ll see from the next picture just how much damage they can do to metal. ey’re not eating it, it’s what’s called crevice corrosion, where the barnacles attach to the metal and starve it of oxygen. Steel, in particular, needs oxygen to create the invisible ‘oxide coating’ which gives it it’s ‘stainless’ qualities. Deprive an area of oxygen yet still allow contact with water and you’re asking for rust and crevice corrosion.

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DAMAGE UNLIMITED

You can see the pitting on the hull of Roger’s boat caused by the barnacles. Don’t panic, this is not as bad as it looks, they’ve simply eaten their way into the antifoul paint. Having said that, the longer you leave the barnacles on your hull, the more potential damage they can do.

7 APPLY SOME ACID

ese little marks are called barnacle plates and are the remnants of the barnacle. To remove these, you need to apply a small amount of hydrochloric acid to the badly affected areas, then scrape them off with a dull-edged metal knife or scraper.

Once you have done this, apply a coat of lime remover spray to neutralize the acid and make the hull safe to work on.

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SPRAY AWAY

Once you have scraped off as many of the barnacles as you can using a scraper, you can go around the entire hull again with a wire brush if needs be but using a pressure washer is the norm nowadays.

With a pressure washer, you can expect to lose some more paint and antifoul. Try to angle the jet of water parallel to the hull, rather than directly at it (as shown here). Doing this will help lift any stubborn barnacles.

LET IT DRY

With the hull now scraped you need to give it one last wash and then let it dry out for a few days before you reapply any antifoul. Once the antifoul and any touch up paint has dried, you should then give the hull a really good polish with some dedicated boat polish. Doing this will make the hull slick and help prevent barnacles growing so quickly. It will also help make the job of barnacle removal that bit easier next year, as well as giving you a few extra knots of speed in the water.