We wrote previously about the gawdawful Poliglow that was used on our boat and how sad it made her look. Plus, after 15 years and a trip around the world there were plenty of bumps and bruises all over. Our general rule is to spend our maintenance and upgrade dollars first on repairs and such that keep us from sailing but we both felt the need to spruce up the old girl. A normal compound and wax just wouldn’t do the trick; we were starting from -10 and we wanted to get to +8 or thereabouts. That’s a long way to go. All of our scrubbing and stripping failed to remove the offending Poliglow and after several trips around the boat with our fiberglass guy and a lot of testing of various toxic brews the conclusion was: it’ll have to be sanded off. This concurred with our own Internet research, and reluctantly we agreed to the estimate.
The work happens in fits and starts, which is apparently how it is here in Trinidad. Between rainstorms and road closings and our guys getting pulled onto other jobs, we eventually had to make a little noise in the office to get things going. Luckily Brian and our main man Ryan take great pride in what they do, and we’re delighted with the results so far. This includes — besides the big job of sanding all the Poliglow off and compounding the hulls and deck — a fiberglass wrap of our hull-to-deck joint around the port trampoline, filling and gel coating of various chips and cracks, dinghy dings at the back steps, and a couple of amateur patch jobs that bothered us.
After the compounding but before the waxing Jason of Signlab applied new striping, logo, boat name and hailing port. EV is looking good!
