colingh
New member
Every year my 28ft yacht is lifted out of her Ipswich Marina home for her annual TLC. The few small patches of fouling where the second coat of Cruising Performer wasn't applied properly induce feelings of mild embarrassment. There may also be perhaps less than a quarter of a bucket-full of sea-squirts hang down towards the aft end of her hull.
Since being launched last September and lifted out at the end of August this year, her hull has become badly fouled. Also, for the FIRST TIME EVER in her eleven years of residence in Ipswich Marina, she'd acquired an infestation of small mussels. Her rudder always gets more than two coats of a/f paint because it's a handy surface to work the paint out of the roller before a tea-break. Much good it did this year because the side that sees most sunlight had a solid coating of them.
The sail-drive propeller was installed last September and, because it was new, it got a liberal coating of Hempel aluminium (?) anti-fouling spray paint along with the drive leg. (I used Hempel because Fox's didn't have any of the Tri-Lux I've always used satisfactorily.) I might as well have used Dulux house paint for all the good it did, and Tri-Lux may have been no better.
The point of this post is to ask if other people with boats moored in Ipswich Marina and other Suffolk/Essex places had a similar experience of excessive fouling this year.
Also, amongst the normal dark grey mussels were a few brown ones. I reported them to the government scientists and unfortunately my photographs were not good enough to identify them as the same as the invasive species that's been discovered near Southampton recently. More container ships from all round the world visit Felixstowe than Southampton, and if you find any brown mussels the government's scientists would like to know.
Colin
Since being launched last September and lifted out at the end of August this year, her hull has become badly fouled. Also, for the FIRST TIME EVER in her eleven years of residence in Ipswich Marina, she'd acquired an infestation of small mussels. Her rudder always gets more than two coats of a/f paint because it's a handy surface to work the paint out of the roller before a tea-break. Much good it did this year because the side that sees most sunlight had a solid coating of them.
The sail-drive propeller was installed last September and, because it was new, it got a liberal coating of Hempel aluminium (?) anti-fouling spray paint along with the drive leg. (I used Hempel because Fox's didn't have any of the Tri-Lux I've always used satisfactorily.) I might as well have used Dulux house paint for all the good it did, and Tri-Lux may have been no better.
The point of this post is to ask if other people with boats moored in Ipswich Marina and other Suffolk/Essex places had a similar experience of excessive fouling this year.
Also, amongst the normal dark grey mussels were a few brown ones. I reported them to the government scientists and unfortunately my photographs were not good enough to identify them as the same as the invasive species that's been discovered near Southampton recently. More container ships from all round the world visit Felixstowe than Southampton, and if you find any brown mussels the government's scientists would like to know.
Colin
