OMG, It’s Full of …

… barnacles! I just received some whatsapp pictures from the nice person at our winter storage place. They had lifted our dear Hanse yacht out of the water, and then looked at its bottom in disbelief. “No so great,” he texted me.

Barnacle Gallery

Rudder, covered with barnacles, on our Hanse 388, s/y Charlotte. — Lower part of the rudder, filled with barnacles. Funny, how the asphalt (or chipseal or something) ground looks quite similar to the rudder 🙂

Rudder and bottom of our Hanse 388, covered with barnacles. — Upper part of the rudder. How *very* peculiar that where there *isn’t* any anti-fouling paint, there are almost no barnacles at all. Maybe they used the *pro-*fouling paint by mistake 🙈

Bottom and sail drive of our Hanse 388, covered with barnacles. — In the opening scenes of the Star Wars movies, there are usually some huge space ship floating by, from the upper back corner. Also, the sail drive rubber has removed itself, again, and is almost sucked into the black sail drive hole.

Keel of our Hanse 388, covered with barnacles. — Before (upper part) and after (the lower part) the best a turbo pressure washer could do on th keel. The force wasn’t quite strong enough, here.

What Had Happened?

I sent over an email to our Hanse dealer, with pictures and all, asking what they think had happened.

They answered immediately. And I started texting the same information to the winter storage person.

“So, they told me what had happened,” I started.

“Yes?” he wrote back.

“Down in Greifswald, they put the wrong anti-fouling on it. They put some super ecological paint, designed only for freshwater lakes,” I continued.

He replied quickly, with just a single emoji.

“🤦‍♂️”

What Next?

Hanse (or rather our dealer) apologised for having messed up the bottom paint. They offered to pay for part of the fixing costs, but at the moment I’m not sure how much that is going to be.

The yard will have to grind away what’s left of the barnacles, and after that put new anti-fouling on the boat. So far it seems the primer is ok, so hopefully it won’t be a huge job.

I will post more news and pictures as the barnacle story develops!

Dec 1, 2019Anonymous