Improper thoughts about the properties of bottom paint
Issue 49 : Jul/Aug 2006
The nice thing about many routine boat jobs is that you can unplug your brain from the task at hand and allow it to wander freely. That’s when creative thinking can happen. It wasn’t all that creative, I suppose, and it wasn’t a long leap of the imagination that led me to contemplate the properties of bottom paint the other day in the boatyard. The thoughts I was thinking were not very charitable. Not just then anyway. I was in a sort of dark funk actually.
I was holding a paintbrush full of bottom paint upside down while working on Mystic’s bottom, which was (of course) well above me . . . in spite of common sense, in opposition to all laws of flotation and gravity, and particularly in spite of what seems proper in boats. Jerry tells me that bottom paint costs about 100 gazillion dollars for a gallon. So the paint blobs that were running back down the brush and down my arm were probably worth a dollar or two per run and splatter.
It was the runs and splatters I was contemplating while holding the brush upside down in defiance of gravity. “What is it about bottom paint, anyway?” I was wondering. In the past decade I had reduced the natty appearance of one pair of rubber boots, two pairs of boat shoes, and several pairs of socks with large black splots of paint. I had wrecked one Tilley hat and had just ruined a winter parka. The splatters on shoes and boots are easy to explain. A dripping brush, held upside down, will eventually lob drips on feet below it. And those feet aren’t normally wearing little white coveralls like the rest of my body.
As for the paint on the Tilley hat and the parka, I have no one to blame but myself. But I also choose to blame Mystic for being low and very much in the way when one is encumbered with a paintbrush in one hand and a can in the other, a goofy white suit over all, and surrounded by a jungle of intertwined jack stands and scaffolding. Every so often I manage to stand too straight in a place that does not allow for straightening up. And there goes another hat (or worse, a wad of hair is artificially blackened). I could have had the little white hood on the little white Tyvek suit pulled up. But I did not. And then it was too late for recrimination. Best I can do afterward is rationalize that it wasn’t my best hat anyway or it really was time to replace that coat. Now each had certainly been downgraded one level to the status of “work clothes.”
“On the other hand,” I thought glumly, “maybe I’m not looking at this properly. With the high price of bottom paint, these paint designs should be status symbols . . . at least among boaters.” So if you see me wearing that red parka with the black markings all over the hood, please note that I’m wearing it proudly. And the Tilley hat? It’s the most comfortable of all my hats. I try not to wear it in public, but it’s still my favorite. Besides, it’s decorated with a black symbol of conspicuous consumption. It proves that we are boaters and proud of it.
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