Category Archives: Repairs

The Low Down on Coppercoat Antifouling: Part II

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In our last blog post we started the process of preparing our boat for new antifouling.  We typically used paint, but technology has changed and the better choice for protecting your boat’s bottom is coppercoat.  We ran into some problems and the original blog post grew too long so we broke it up into a few posts.  Here is part II.

Coppercoat

We ordered the coppercoat directly from the NZ coppercoat contact.  We ended up ordering 20 one liter kits which contain part A and B and the copper) and an additional (2) one liter cans for us (for any future repairs).  The reason we orderd one liter cans is because the coppercoat has a very specific application process and ordering it in larger quantities like 10L or 20L cans makes it very difficult for the team to apply it fast enough before it sets. You only get about 20-30 minutes to apply while constantly stirring your paint tin.

First the team, and yes, I mean “team” as 5 Norsand guys bring the supplies.  They set up a make shift table to lay everything out.  The 20 kits (each has 3 parts), 15 buckets, 15 paint trays, 15 rollers, 5 small rollers, tons of rags, turps, and gloves.  So much plastic.  The Coppercoat sets so quickly that they cannot reuse the buckets, trays, or rollers for more than a few coats.  Everything moves at warped speed.

The preparations continue as the team (Aaron, Josh, Conor, Ian, Luke) tape off our saildrives, rudder bearings, transducers and other vital parts that can’t be covered in coppercoat and need protection.

The Application

The boat is washed down with ISO to remove all dust particles and then the magic begins.

Our chemist, Josh begins the mixing process.  He is dedicated to mixing each kit and keeping the painter’s trays mixed so the Coppercoat doesn’t set too quickly. Aaron (far left) is the yard manager and is supervising before starting the painting process.

The 5 guys work straight through lunch for over 5 hours applying 5+ coats, evenly, consistently, and professionally along our hulls.  It was exhausting work but they powered through and completed the job!  We were so pleased that we had a little happy hour celebration under the boat.

The first coat (top), the 3rd coat (middle) and the final coat (still wet).

I must be honest, I am not a fan of the color (copper) but I am even less pleased with what the color will look like once it spends 4-6 months in the salt water and oxidizes. And this is the permanent color for the next 10 years.  These are not our boats (obviously), but it will give you an idea of what Coppercoat looks like once it has oxidized in the ocean.

Prop Speed

The coppercoat sets as we are finishing up a few other boat projects.  One of the final projects is preparing the saildrives and props.  We sand them down, apply a barrier coat to the sail drives (the white paint), sand down the props one more time. Then it is time to apply prop speed which helps prevent growth and corrosion on the sail drives and props.  The bright yellow sure clashes with our copper bottom – oh well.

Activating the Coppercoat

It seems so wrong, but this is the process.  The yard comes in a few days before we splash to burnish (sand down) our beautifully painted Coppercoat.   Jamie uses 320 grit sand paper to activate the copper – but it was really hard to watch them burnish the new bottom job.

And that is the Coppercoat process.

Did you miss Part I of “The Low Down on Coppercoat Antifouling?”  Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual live events.  This blog post started in early November and finished around the end of November.

Bare Bones: A Dirty Job

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Time to get the boat ready for many projects which means taking her back to the bare bones which is a very dirty job.

Preparing Our Bottom

The first thing we did was pressure wash or waterblast the bottom of the boat.  This knocks off the first layer of muck that might have accumulated since our last cleaning.  Then the sanding begins and this is a dirty job!

Norsand Boatyard assigned Jamie, a 19 year old laborer to the task.  He worked very hard removing our bottom paint over 4.5 days. Lucky for him we only had 2 layers of bottom paint and then the primer to remove.  Had we done this 3 years ago he would have had to get through 20 years of bottom paint, layered over and over itself.  It takes Jamie about one full day to do half of the hull.

Jamie sands the top layer of black, then blue, then the army green barrier coat to get to the white/grey shown below.

Not a Good Sign

Two years ago we sanded down the bottom to the original barrier coat.  However, this time we sanded down further.  We have never sanded down this far and several things shocked and dismayed us!  

The first thing we discovered was that we have a few small areas on each bow with osmosis!  Basically water engress which is never a good thing.  We will certainly have to address this and repair it before we apply the new primer for the coppercoat.

Repairs to the Bones

In order to properly fix the osmosis areas Ben comes in to grind the fiberglass back to a healthy state.  I absolutely hated to see him grind out the fiberglass, but it is what you have to do. 

Ben grinds out every spot, hairline crack, and problem area.  Then meticulously fills them, sands them, and fills and sands them again.  Because our boat was made with vinyl luster that is what he used to fill all the areas in (as opposed to epoxy).

Filler is added to all of the areas and then sanded down.  In some instances he had to go back multiple times to add more filler in order to get the proper results.

Losing Our Minds

For the past 13 years Matt and I have been baffled by the starboard waterline.  For some reason, the waterline on the inside of the starboard hull was always lower which would indicate there is too much weight on that side of the boat.  So, we were constantly moving things to the center of the boat or to the port side to raise the water line.  

Little did we know that the boat was not unevenly weighted down.  The waterline was way off!  In fact it was 3-4″ shorter than its sister side!  What the heck?  So we borrow a digital laser level from the yard.  Matt sets it up where the front of the bow and that back of the boat are even and then draws a line between the two.

It is rather remarkable how uneven both sides are.  We think the original owner used a string and when pulled tight dips in the center.  This would explain how the bow and the stern were even but the center dips into a low “U.”  The bottom two photos show you the exact same spot on port and starboard — see the difference?

The good news is it can easily be fixed.  We will mark the new waterline and sand the gelcoat to match the bottom.

Removing the Daggerboards

In the 13 years that we have owned Sugar Shack we have never removed our dagger boards.  We love to use them, but why remove them?  Well for one thing they are stupid expensive, like $8000 euro each!  But we needed to sand off the bottom paint and apply our coppercoat – so out they came.

We used the spin halyard to hoist them and with Matt on the ground and me on the wench we slowly got each board to the ground.  These suckers are HEAVY and huge!  They measured 15′ tall.

If you dig deep enough you will find more problems.  We found a few issues with the dagger board casings.  We stuck our faces below the hole and looked up and to our surprise we found osmosis inside.  Unfortunately there is not much we can do as it is a very tiny and narrow space prohibiting tools from getting up in there.  We do make small repairs at the opening (right photo) as far up as we can go.

On the port rudder shaft there are two small repairs that we have to make. One is a crack at the opening of the casing (top photo) and the other is a bubble that sticks out enough to mark the shaft.

In upcoming blog posts we strip all of the graphics (stripes, logos, designs) off the boat.  The cover photo is when Sugar Shack is truly bare bones.

Frankly, I am surprised at all that we found once we took our boat down to the bare bones.  It was a truly dirty job in my ways than one, but certainly worth it to get her back to tip top shape.  Now we are ready to being the coppercoat process.

Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual live events.  The events in this blog post occured in early November.  In our last blog we share what Life is Like on the Hard.

Life on the Hard: Boatyard Projects

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We haul out Sugar Shack at Norsand Boatyard to complete lots and lots of boat projects.  The plan was to be “on the hard” for 5-6 weeks but a lot of projects have to be done in sequential order and cannot be done simultaneously.  We started booking contractors and work back in May to ensure that we could get all of the work done and be back in the water before Christmas.  Several blog posts will come out about this journey.

Last season in New Zealand we were able to complete a lot of upgrades, maintenance jobs, repairs, and a few miscellaneous projects.  We were tied to the dock at Town Basin Marina for almost 8 months where we upgraded to lithium batteries, repaired our salon window seals, replaced our main sail and genoa, replaced our dinghy and dinghy chaps, had a new cockpit enclosure made, new interior and exterior fabric for our cushions, new ceiling panels, new LED light fixtures, and new stainless counter tops and sink.  It was a lot!  (to read more about these upgrades, search our website for the specific blog post or click on the above links.

Hauling out

Hauling out and splashing always makes my heart race.  So many things can go wrong and yet we’ve been blessed with excellent workers at each yard.  We had a late haul out because we had to wait for high tide which was 4:00pm on our scheduled date.  We arrived and found the dock empty (which evidently was not normal).  The slipway manager was busy swapping trailers and we came in a smidge early so lucky for us another cruiser met us at the jetty to grab our lines. (top photo).  I was afraid I’d have to prove my non-existent Texas skills by lassoing the pilon.

Norsand Jetty

Norsand Jetty

Kevin, the slipway manager and Shane arrive and slowly walk Sugar Shack down the slip toward the ramp.  Another two workers showed up to toss us lines for the starboard side.  Once secured, Kevin rows a dinghy out to measure the exact placement of the trailer.

They use a large tractor to push the trailer into the water.  It has to be lined up right down the center of the boat.

They expertly manuever the trailer under our boat, without incident.  Once the trailer is in place, Kevin rows his boat out again to use the trailer’s controllers to set the supports on our bulk heads (the strongest part of the boat).  It is a slow, tediuous process, but we don’t rush them.   Slow is pro!

Coming Out of the Water

Once the boat is secured onto the trailer she is slowly pulled out of the water.  

Kevin and Shane blocked us on the trailer for the night right at the top of the slipway and smack dab in the middle of the yard.  Hello Norsand, Sugar Shack has arrived!

The Projects Begin Before We Are Even Blocked

The following projects are started early the next morning, before we are moved to our parking spot.

  • Removed both rudders (the original starboard rudder and the temproary rudder)
  • Removed both props
  • Removed both saildrives (this is done by Whangarei Marine as they will service them)
  • Evaluated our vinyl/stickers with Vital Signs and he shows us how to remove them

We are moved and blocked later that afternoon.  Not sure how he is able to squeeze us in between these other two boats, but he does with no problems.

Thank Goodness We Are Not This Wide

There was a trimaran that had been in the yard for 25 months!  She had a lot of work done and was finally going back in the water.  The problem was she is too wide to go down the slipway so they have to brining  a 90-ton crane to lift her up and over into the water.  

It was remarkably fast and effecient.  The yard did a tremendous job and truly was due to the expertise of the slipway team with Kevin at the lead.  The crane arrived around 8:30am and was done by 11:30am!

Boat Yard Projects:

We have scheduled a lot of boat projects with the yard, including:

  1. Haul out / Splash
  2. Waterblast
  3. Copper coat bottom (sanding down bottom paint, applying primer & copper coat)
  4. Re-Seal the deck and hull joint around the entire boat
    • In the end, we also resealed the starboard large hatch, both helm seats & stations, both davits, the bimini.
    • We also resealed / caulked the new ceiling panels in all 3 cabins, master bath. Caulked the salon around the new counter tops & around the nav station.
  5. Gelcoat repairs
    • Below the waterline: repaired small osmosis areas, small cracks, dagger boards, and sail drive casings
    • Above the waterline: both hulls had previous repairs that no longer matched the surrounding gelcoat so we blended them better; 2 small areas at starboard bow
    • Sugar scoops: both sugar scoops around cleats, steps, and by waterline
    • Deck: Port bow filled holes from old cleat, cockpit, filled crack on hatch, both entries at sugar scoop filled holes from old barrier (water stop barriers)
    • Inside: a few of our bulk heads had small hairline cracks that we reinforced and re-glassed
  6. Wash, wax, polish
  7. Prop-speed on the props

Outside Contractor Projects: Outside of the boatyard staff:

  1. Canvas: Kim is coming back to give us phifertex side panels for the cockpit enclosure and new phifertex and sauleda window covers for the salon.
  2. Whangarei Marine removed our props and saildrives.  We are replacing the bellows, clamp rings, o-rings, and seals on both saildrives.  Huge . They also sleeved, turned, polished the wear marks on the saildrive shafts and lapped the starboard cone.  An big and expensive job.
  3. Vital Signs is replacing all of our vinyl graphics, stickers, logos on the boat.  
  4. Aakron Express is repairing our EVA/non-skid which came up on the interior floor of our dinghy
  5. RH PRecision is making our new rudder shafts, then we will take them to Alert Anodising to anodise them.
  6. New custom fit rudders are being built.
  7. Denray Marine will service our liferaft and 4 of our PFDs
  8. Nautilus Braids will provide us with new main sheets, spin halyard, reefing line, Oh $hit line (hand hold off bimini), and a roll of dynema
  9. Cleigh Ltd, Matthew Duckett will install a new 220v inverter/charger.

Matt and Christine’s Projects

  1. Remove all vinyl stickers, logos and adhesive (5+ days)
  2. Replace anchor chain markers indicating length (every 10m) and clean 100m of stainless chain (3-5 days_
  3. Install heater port heater
  4. Install 12v Inverter/charger, Matt assisted with wires, breaker, installation
  5. Varnish hand rails along cabin top, flag pole, hand holds in cockpit, helm seats, princess seats, flag pole, bimini rails (all 4 sides), princess seats, and wench handle holder
  6. Clean and polish all interior wood
  7. Polish all stainless
  8. Replace window screens
  9. Repair utensil drawer 
  10. Repair wood along aft bimini (wood glue)
  11. Repair, paint, seal starboard head ceiling (5 panels have chipped paint on fiberglass)
  12. Repair 3 steps on both both sugar scoops (teak work)
  13. Sewing projects (probably won’t get to): new fender covers, new cockpit table cover, new cockpit pockets, new recycle bags, new man over board cover, new outboard cover

As you can see we are doing a LOT of work.  And it is putting my project management skills to the test!  We are hoping to get all of this done within 5 weeks!

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts on building new rudders, coppercoat (bottom job), vinyl stickers, gel coat repairs, and canvas work.

The cover photo is Sugar Shack after removing her stickers and her bottom paint.  That is our NZ car that we bought last season and are tooling around this season (BMW 330i with 20k miles that we bought for $3850!)  What a deal!  We will sold it for the same price after we splashed back into the water.

Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual live events.  This blog happened the 2nd week of November 2023.  Did you catch our Christmas in Whangarei blog where I bake over 800 cookies and ring the bell until it upset the Mayor?