“BARNACLED AND GREEN AS GRASS BELOW”

Kim Lifted by Grenada Marine's Travelift

I was reminded of this line from Henry Newbold’s poem “The Old Superb” when Grenada Marine’s Travelift lifted Kadash, AKA Kim from the water yesterday, and we were confronted with the site of Kim’s hull thickly covered with marine growth, to the extent that it was surprising that she could drag herself through the water, even though, to quote Newbold again “… night and day the Trades were driving blind”. Even slight weed growth has a detrimental effect on the performance of ships, and in the nineteenth century the Royal Navy pioneered the technique of using copper sheets to reduce fouling. Copper sheeting has given way to special antifouling paint, or in some cases an epoxy coating containing powdered copper.

We repainted the bottom of Kim, our forty foot sailboat at Almerimar in southern Spain in July 2024.  Our choice of antifouling paint is rather limited, as Kim has an aluminium hull, and use of an incompatible antifouling could cause electrolytic corrosion.  As the preferred antifouling, International Trilux 33 can only now be bought for professional use, we used the less effective International Cruiser 200. 

After leaving Almerimar, we took Kim westward through the Mediterranean, and then through the Strait of Gibraltar to Puerto Calero on the Canary Island of Lanzarote, via Rabat in Morocco.  We left the boat in Lanzarote for a few weeks while we returned home, having scheduled a haulout and bottom repaint in Puerto Calero.  However, due to a mix up with dates, we missed our slot in the boatyard, and the opportunity of hauling her out. 

Before setting off from Lanzarote to run down the Trades to the West Indies, the transatlantic crew, Ed Sadler and Martin Weston, made a valiant effort to clean the hull by swimming in the marina, but that was no substitute for a haulout.

A Wonder the Poor Boat Could Move at All

Since then, with hindsight, the boat has been going progressively slower in our Caribbean cruise from Grenada to the British Virgin Islands and back.  I used to allow an average speed of five knots for passage making, and Kim nearly always did much better than that, but recently we’ve been only averaging a bit over four.  Even then, and even when struggling to keep up with nominally slower boats, I hadn’t really appreciated the scale of the problem, often ascribing our lack of progress to over cautious reefing, or the Equatorial Current.

We gave the boat another scrub off by swimming when we were in Virgin Gorda, but as we lack any sort of diving equipment, and I am not keen on holding my breath when under Kim’s flat bottom, we did not appreciate the scale of the problem.

For nearly a year since we left Almerimar, to coin a phrase, the weed has been growing under our feet, and as a consequence we’ve had slower passages, and burned more diesel than we should have.

Summer Layup in the Yard at Grenada Marine

Next year, Trilux 33 and fast passages!