Pitufa.at

Getting on the hard here is a fairly adventurous undertaking: At full moon or new moon (when the tides are especially high) boats go into a cradle in the shallow water, then when the tide is low the cradle is dragged up the ramp to be able to work on the boat. To get back into the water, it’s the same system in reverse…
We have accumulated lots of layers of antifouling over the last 18 years. Usually it was my job to sand off whatever was coming loose fairly easily and then we just slapped on the next coat… This time we used the opportunity to have a whole crew of workers, who took about 2 weeks to sand Pitufa down to the epoxy. First by hand, later with an orbital sander and then finally with the angle grinder and orbital sander to once more to finish it off.
We couldn’t get our beloved Carboline Alloy plus antifouling here in the Philippines (the only aluminium antifouling that has worked for several years so far) and in the end we settled for the only available antifouling for aluminium: Nexeon 710, according to PPG “an innovative ultra-low friction copper-free antifouling”, but mainly used for freighters . We’ll see how that’ll work.
Christian used the opportunity to check the cutlass bearing, always fun to get the prop off