Barnacles!!
Argh!! The bane of my existence.
So, when I first bought the boat, I found that the previous owner had painted the prop with the same stuff used on the bottom. And it worked pretty good. The boat had hard paint on it and the hard paint was keeping the prop cleaned as well.
The first couple of years I had the boat, I used the same paint, and I did the same thing with the prop. But I am not a hard core racer, and I don’t play one on TV even. So the marina owner suggested that I might want to switch to ablative paint. That way, I could just slap it on and go, rather than going through all the prep process. So I did. He also suggested using PropSpeed to prevent barnacle growth on the prop. I did that as well.
PropSpeed is a pain in the patootie. It’s a two part application, and part two has to be applied immediately after applying part one. So it takes two people to do it.
So what happens when I pull the boat out in the fall? Well, the prop is full of barnacles. So much for PropSpeed. And at $250 (at the time – price is up another $50 now), that was a very expensive experiment. Mind you, I still have enough around for a second application. And there are still alot of people I’ve met who swear by it. So maybe I just didn’t get it on correctly.
But I moved onto the next suggestion: Barnacle Barrier. It’s much easier to apply. You just spray it on. But I pulled the boat and, again, the prop was filled with barnacles. Mind you, they were easier to scrape off from the prop. But the prop was still covered in Zinc, the main ingredient in the spray, and covered with barnacles as well.
Again, there are plenty of people who swear by the stuff. But with this, I can’t see how I could have applied it wrong.
Lately, members of the CAL mailing list have been touting the use of Lanocote for preventing barnacle growth. The literature says that it only works for 6 montsh. But I could be happy with that. It can also be applied underwater. So, if it isn’t working as long or well as expected, whoever is diving the boat can apply some more.
I’ve applied this to the prop and to the knotmeter paddlewheel. The latter may not be a good test, since it’s plastic, not metal. But it can be used as my canary in the mine: if the knotmeter isn’t working, it means the paddlewheel is covered in barnacles. So we’ll see how well it works.
It does apply pretty easily. The directions say to heat the metal to apply easily. I heated the substance, which melted under a blowdryer pretty well. I could then paint it onto the prop. Since I really couldn’t heat the paddlewheel easily, this allowed me to apply the Lanocote to the paddlewheel fairly easily as well.
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I’ll try to update here to let everyone know how well it works.