ON THE GRID AT BAHÍA
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, Sunday, 16 November 2008

We are long overdue for a paint job on the bottom. I had wanted to do it on the beach up in Panamá last winter, i.e., after six months. But we were saving money for new sails and for summer air travel. So it had to be put off until we were back in Bahía. We booked the November tides because: a) there was a chance we could afford the paint by then and, b) these are some of the highest tides of the year.


We decide that we can afford to hire Maestro Luiz to do the actual painting. Even though we had some communications problems two years ago – concerning money. But we knew that he does good work, so give him a call at his cellphone number (091 179.058). We meet briefly, and after a little haggling, nail down a fixed price of $150 for the work - to include two coats of bottom paint, two coats of white enamel on the topsides, and the “Vilisar” lettering at the bow. (The Canadian Registrar of Ships requires that commercial vessels must have the ship’s name in 4-inch letters on each side of the bow. Vilisar was originally registered as a commercial fishing vessel back in 1973 and the letters are carved into the planking still.) The work has to be done on the weekend because Maestro Luiz is busy all week in Manta at present. We have booked the Yacht Club's makeshift grid (actually, it's just a stone wall, not even a grid, really) for four days over the monthly-extreme tides. Maestro Luiz is sure that it can all be done in two days with just himself and two painters. And, as it turns out, he is right.



My job is to act as Step&Fetch. The paint has been stored over at Suzie’s Hostal Coco Bongo since we Vilisar has been torn apart for the fuel-tank work and there has been no place to store paint on board. As soon as Pinturas Maestra opens on Saturday, I carry two 5-litre cans of bottom paint over there to be shaken up for twenty minutes on their machine. (There is a touchy moment when the owner asks why I had not bought my anti-fouling paint from him when he charges the same price. But, we had already been through this six weeks ago. I bought Hempel Olympic 86900 ablative anti-fouling paint from Pinturas Zambrano in Manta because Pinturas Meastra’s Hempel bottom paint is not ablative. It’s hard anti-fouling paint meant for fiberglass pangas, the open fishing boats that are used up and down the coast. Pinturas Maestra also sells it retail to the locals out of 5-gallon drums, I noticed, and does not bother to agitate it before dipping into the barrel to sell paint into smaller cans.) Even Maeastra Luiz, the painter, is shocked to hear that the paint costs $98 for a five-litre tin when best-quality local outdoor enamel sells for $13 for four litres (they call it a ‘gallon’ here, but it is actually a little more). Basically, Luiz is not used to working with paints that have such large amounts of expensive copper in them, metal that settles to the bottom of the can during the work and therefore has to be stirred frequently. I stick around to make sure they were doing that. At these prices, local fishermen don’t use much bottom paint; they just run the pangas up on the beach occasionally and scrape the bottom clean.

Using 15 litres of bottom paint and about 2-3 quarts of white enamel, we get two coats of paint on everything including the new “forest green” accent strip along the cap rail (it actually looks blue-ish to me, but then again, I’m red-green colour-blind, so what do I know?). The paint costs $350 altogether. Other materials like thinners, brushes, rollers, epoxy filler and the like cost another $50-$60. I already had the three sacrificial zincs on hand; they cost about $10 each, so another $30. (Bring zincs from home - esepciaoy doughnut shaft zinks if you need non-metric sizes - if you need them as they are not easily located here in Ecuador. The alternative is to buy much larger zinc plates meant for fishing boats and cut them up into the desired size and shape.)

The Maestro and his two men work about ten hours altogether over two mornings. We had agreed to $150 flat rate, but I pay him $160 and give $5 to each of the two hired hands for helping with various other tasks like moving the wooden bents, etc. We have set four iron-wood bents (about 5x5 inches) but we are not very successful at landing on them. Mostly we just manage to get one of them under us and that buries it deeply into the sand. Not much use, really. You need to have more depth for going on the grid too to allow you to get on them.

The Club de Yate de Bahía charges $10 a day, so $20 in this case. The endlessly long rock concert on Saturday night was an added though doubtful pleasure. But at least we can use the Club’s toilets, showers and swimming pool. Altogether I reckon the whole paint job cost us about $600. At less than 30 percent of the whole cost, the workmen were the very least of the cost. Painting the bottom is not cheap any more as the costs of anti-fouling paint seem to have doubled over the time we have owned the boat.

I did find two little teredo worm holes on a piece of bare wood just at the water line; I snagged a floating mangrove trunk out at sea one night on the way down from Panamá and chipped some paint. The little buggers are fast workers. I should have slapped some underwater putty on it right away but was thinking we were going on the grid soon anyway. Now I work underwater putty into the two holes and paint over it with bottom paint. What bothers me more is that, even though I examine everything carefully, there may be other places with worm infestation that I cannot see.

Inspection also reveals that it is more that time to replace the sacrificial wormshoe, used on a wooden boat to prevent teredo worm damage to the keel. Traditionally, tar-soaked material is applied under the keel and kept in place by a length of wood; this system is called a wormshoe. As mentioned, this wormshoe is sacrificial and from time to time has to be replaced and renewed or the bottom of the wooden keel, i.e., the part you cannot usually get at when painting the bottom, will be attackedaten by shipworms. Sometimes it just rots away. The real keel is thereby exposed. We are now past this point. I have regularly filling gaps with emergency epoxy caulking. But soon I shall have to haul out or careen on the beach and get a carpentero de ribera (shipwright) to shape a new wormshoe for me. Hauling out might be easier, but there is no place nearby and the costs when you do get to Puerto Lucia at Salinas, Ecuador, to the Costa Rica Yacht Club at Puntarenas, or to the Flamenco Yard in Panamá are frequently very, very steep. Why can’t fairly self-sufficient sailors like us just careen the boat here on the beach and employ Maestro German Panda, the same carpenter who did our interior work around the engine heat exhaust and the new battery box? It would be new for him, but I bet he could handle it without difficulty. It’s not too difficult, after all. The hard part is to get the keel fully exposed. Gary Swenson, the American who first started Puerto Amistad, told me that he can get us tropical woods (e.g. cedros amargar?) that would be nasty for shipworms and also be rot-resistant underwater. The carpentero also mentioned rot-resistant woods too. Must give this some thought.