Antifouling Paint Testing--Chesapeake Bay

[thinwater]

We've (Practical Sailor Magazine) has been soaking test panels (28 paints) in Deale, MD for a year. To focus was 2-year ablative paints, but there are few hard paints and single-season paints in there. There are also 5 paints on a test boat that is sailed regularly (mine). Also quite a few copper-free paints.



The burning questions were:

• Is the Chesapeake (brackish) much different from the Florida and New England (sea water) test sites?
• Are the new paints, nearly all reformulated away from Irgarol and formulated to meet California's (and probably will be adopted by Washington) reduced copper leaching rate, still effective? A lot of the old favorites are no longer manufactured.

The tests will run 2-years +. I don't know when this will be published. Soon, I hope.



The bottom line, without typing pages and angering the publisher, is that at least at one-year, most of the reformulated paints are doing quite well, at least as well as our "old" reference paint (West Marine PCA Gold, very similar to Pettit SR40). Some will perform beyond two years, and I'm sure some will fail, as they always do. The other not-surprise is that 2-year paints have always done relatively well from a leaching rate perspective, because they have to make their copper load last, parceling it our carefully. The reformulation is probably minor.

[sailorboy1]

Having bottom painted in Jacksonville FL on the NE coast of Florida nd then moved to the West coast on FL and stayed on a mooring 5 months later:

I am pretty positive the water on the different FL coasts is a lot different and I am sure the same applies to the Chesapeake. In fact on an older bottom once that grew a 2" mat in Fl, a couple weeks in the Chesapeake later became clean.