Keeping my sailboat on a boat lift.

[CaptainJAG]

I am new to this forum, and new to owning a sailboat as well. I recently purchased a 1986 Hunter 28.5 to do some weekend cruising. We live on the Banana River in mid Florida and will be cruising mostly on the ICW. I have so many questions but the first one is bottom paint. The boat slip I purchased had a lift in it so I altered it to fit our sailboat and plan to keep her lifted whenever we are not using her. How does this effect the bottom paint? It currently has what seems to be a very thin coat of an ablative paint on it, but it is bare in several spots. There is rust showing in several spots on the cast ion keel.

My thoughts were to remove all of the existing paint and start over with a hard paint. Then I discovered that keeping a boat out of the water kills the paint so why bother. My next thought was using an epoxy system. I am looking for advice from anyone who might be able to shed some light on this.

On a side note, we hit a sand bar on our second trip out and ended up snapping the rudder off clean at the post. It revealed a big problem that we are thankful didn't happen further from home, or on our way to the bahamas. There must have been some electrolysis at some point because the shaft was rusted almost completely through. I had a new rudder made from Foss Foams and just got it yesterday, I want to figure out what direction I'm going to go with the paint and do the rudder before I reinstall.