Boat Journal

Chronicling a love affair with sailing

Tag: paint

False Starts

Doug (the marina owner) suggested that white paint was not a good idea for the deck – too much glare from it. The ‘white’ paint I bought, Matterhorn White, to put on the deck and the white part of the hull, was looking more snowy white than grey-white as the picture would indicate. So I went by TruValue, found a paint sample that was a *much* lighter version of the green stripe on the side and asked if they would mix my paint to that. First guy passed me to second guy, who passed me to third guy who said, ‘Let’s see’. He proceeded to, rather than look at the ‘formula’ (too much paint in the can – formula wouldn’t work, he claimed. Guess he didn’t learn fractions in school), he just dumped some green in, then mixed it. It came out a nice teal. Great. I’d go with that. I put it on the locker covers and it looked really nice. So I painted it on the deck on Saturday.

The sun was just starting to get low in the sky when I finished. I headed to the car and I looked back ARGHHH! It looked awful!!

I didn’t sleep that night, stressed about what I was going to do about it. Stressed about the wasted day. Stressed about the wasted money ($30/qt x 2).

The next day, I went over and re-evaluated the situation. Decided it didn’t really look too bad. All I needed to do was change the stripe color (too much clash) and it would be fine. I asked others opinions. Erik didn’t like it. My sister, Peggy, thought it looked fine.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about people who mess boats up for the next owners, and about what would happen if I had repairs and had to try to find more of that color to repaint portions of the deck. And I took a bit of the original  Matterhorn White and put it over a small portion of the teal. It covered well!

So Sunday was spent with the help of Paul and Grant, sanding, the covering the teal with white.

Now my concern is the shine. On the one hand, I’m using one-part polyurethane which, frankly, doesn’t’ keep its shine for very long without waxing. On the other hand, there are products you can buy to add to the paint to tone down the gloss.

We’ll see.