You know you've been anchored a long time when...
10 January 2011 | Tenacatita Bay
Ellen
...you have a reef system happening under your boat. We have barnacles, a puffer fish, a crab and lots of little fish all right underneath of us. No need to go anywhere to snorkel it's all right here! We have a slight problem in our boot stripe (for those non boater types, this is the colour band along the bottom of the hull right where the water line is). This boot stripe is supposed to be above the water line. Well ours is just below it because we are just to darn heavy. So the problems begin when the sea life decides it's a nice smooth surface to take up residence. The part of the boat under the water has what is called bottom paint and it's full of nasty stuff like copper and things that sea life don't like to grow on. But the boot stripe is just regular paint. So ours grows a profusion of barnacles and about every 4 weeks we have to scrape them off and hope they don't come back (but they always do). The other day when we started to clean the stipe, a crab was walking along the stipe probably enjoying his dinner! Anyhow our solution is coming up one of these days. We are going to haul the boat and paint bottom paint on the boot stipe and even a few inches above. We'll paint it black so that from a distance it will still look like a boot stipe but those nasty little barnacles will not like it and they will go grow on someone else's boat or so we hope. In the meantime, we go into the water and scrape along the boat which really isn't so bad as it gives us a work out and some good swim time.