Anti-fouling
Anti-fouling: (Up) Keep Your Boat Or Lose It To Barnacles!
Did you know that high levels of fouling can reduce the performance of the vessel and increase its fuel requirements? Counteracting or preventing the building up of deposits on underwater surfaces, such as the undersides of boats is what antifouling is all about.
Bottom fouling results from 3 primary causes:
Marine life
Barnacles, zebra mussels, and other small marine critters attach themselves to your boat's bottom while it's sitting in its slip or at its mooring. These critters can multiply like rabbits, covering the boat's bottom quickly once they get started.
Plants
Weeds and water plants can also attach themselves to the boat, most often near the waterline where there's plenty of sunlight.
Algae Slime
Algae can form a gloppy, gooey mess on your boat's bottom, blooming rapidly and creating an environment that attracts other organisms. This creates a nasty, hard-to-clean bottom situation, and slows your boat tremendously when it's moving through the water.
Not every boat necessarily needs anti-fouling bottom paint. Whether a boat would benefit from anti-fouling paint is determined by a couple of factors: The amount of time the boat spends in the water, and the particular marine environment the boat is kept in. If you keep your boat on a trailer and it's actually in the water only a few weeks a year, or if you only use it in fresh water, it probably doesn't need bottom paint. But if you keep your boat in salt water year-round, bottom paint is something you should consider.
Using quality anti-fouling bottom paint on your boat's hull can help prevent bottom fouling from forming in the first place, protecting the hull and saving you a messy clean-up job. Anti-fouling paint uses chemicals called biocides that are released gradually during the boating season to reduce or eliminate marine growth on your boat's underwater surfaces. Most anti-fouling bottom paints use cuprous oxide, and generally, the more cuprous oxide in the paint, the better it will protect your boat's bottom.
