Maintaining your Bottom

Bottom Paint Recommendations for Miami, Florida

Antifouling bottom paint is essential to every boat that lives in salt water. My job as a bottom cleaner isn’t really to keep your boat’s bottom clean- if it were just up to me to do that, I’d have to wipe your boat’s bottom down every few days. Instead, my job is to maintain your bottom paint so that it can do its job, which is to resist marine growth 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Below is some general information to help you choose the best bottom paint for your boat.

Recommended Antifouling Paints:

Interlux Micron 66

Micron 66 is a “hard ablative” or “hybrid” paint that incorporates both leaching of biocides and ablating for the purpose of discouraging growth. In spite of having ablative properties, this paint is pretty hard and withstands bottom cleaning quite well, while emitting significantly less copper pollution into the water than Trinidad and other hard paints. The boats I clean that are painted with this paint seem to do quite well with it.

Petit Trinidad

Petit Trinidad is also a “hard paint” that contains a 60% copper load providing excellent antifouling properties that can last several seasons. With the Irgarol biocide (algal inhibitor) recently added back into this formula, this is the premier bottom paint in the Monterey Bay region.

Please Remember:

Two coats of paint throughout

Three coats on the waterline and rudder

Ensure bottom paint is higher than the waterline to avoid the green algae beard