Make that cunning cheap bastard...

Big fish little board, about those Checkered Whiptail lizards, and what passes for success in law enforcement these days in drugs and terror...

Just to beat some folks to the punch who will say "Yeah, but Bob at Boat Bits is just a cheap bastard, so of course he'd come up with a cunning plan to avoid haulout charges"...

Guilty as charged and proud of it!

So, we were talking about ways to cut down on those boatyard blues, and yes indeed you might say I have a plan. In point of fact, some might, dare I say it, call it cunning!

The great designer of motion picture cameras Andre Coutant once said that to design a silent motion picture camera it was best to start with a camera that was quiet. This, of course, seems rather obvious but at the time it was something of an earth shattering observation...

So, in light of the thought process of Mr Coutant and in honor of the Eclair NPR camera, we actually have the kernel of the plan...

Make the boat less prone to need haulouts. See, simple!

Which means we need a better paint or means of keeping the critters off. As 95% of the reason anyone actually hauls out is because of the need to replace expensive bottom paints. With this in mind, I've decided a belts and braces strategy is the way to go...

The belt, if you will, is a copper/epoxy bottom of the DIY variety. There are, of course, several commercial options for this but they are all rather expensive for something that is really just copper flake/powder (41 microns) mixed into a low viscosity epoxy (System3/West/Raka) with a thixotropic agent (colloidal silica) and, being something of a cheap bastard, what do you think I'm going to do?

The cost of the resulting epoxy/copper mix comes to less than any of the usual suspects that most of us currently use for antifouling paint and as the projected lifespan of a copper/epoxy system is around ten years... Well, my basic math skills tell me this equates to about 20% of what paint costs. Factor in the not having to haul every two years for painting the bottom and the savings just became seriously huge!

That said, there are some issues with copper/epoxy bottoms and they need to be buffed up with a green dish scrubber to expose a bit of copper from time to time but I've noticed most folks with antifouling paint need to do the same, so no real change there.

The folks building the Bob Oram (a longtime user of copper/epoxy antifouling) cat "Scrumble" have a post about doing one of their hulls...

As for the braces... Hard core Luddite's might want to skip this paragraph. I still think that electronic antifouling systems make a lot of sense and given some development are our best option, so we plan to install along with our copper/epoxy bottom job a couple of transducers to make the bottom just that little more of an unfavorable place for critters to hang out.

Now that we have less need to haul out on a regular basis, we need to address the need to come out of the water on an irregular basis. For that, we need to add some legs to the mix. Peter, over at Mostly About Boats, made some excellent legs of the semi-traditional sort for his Albin and over at Atom Voyages there is a less traditional but more stowable version that makes all kinds of sense.

Now with legs I won't have to be at the mercy of some silly priced yard if I need to service something below the waterline or other needful drying out maneuvers...

These projects along with the fact that we converted our mast to a deck-stepped tabernacle system means that 90% of normal haulouts are no longer needful for at least 8-10 years, which pretty much works for me.

Listening to Dr John and music from the first season of Treme (it is after all Fat Tuesday!)

So it goes...