We finally get to see her beautiful bare bottom

The cast-iron keel of our Columbia 43 needed to be sandblasted, so I had Roberto do the whole hull.

As week three of the haulout comes to a close we are finally ready to do some painting. The cast-iron keel of our Columbia was in bad shape and really need to be sandblasted to clean out the corrosion before we faired and sealed it with epoxy filler. Since we were setting up for sandblasting anyway, we decided to have the yard's painter, Roberto, sandblast the entire bottom.

There was about five layers of old bottom paint on the boat. Another one would not be a good thing. Furthermore, the current bottom paint was ablative and I wanted a hard (non-ablative) bottom paint. You can put ablative over hard, but not the other way around. After struggling to remove all those bottom paint layers from just the boot stripe, I was not going to sand the whole bottom. The whole sandblasting operation was almost a thousand bucks, but worth it. There's nothing like a beautiful bare bottom.

For the last several days my wife and I have been sanding and filling, sanding and filling, rinse and repeat. We finally finished with the keel and the bottom and she looks great. Yesterday we gave the boat a good scrub to get rid of the last black dust from the sandblasting. Today was rainy so all we did was clean some more and tape off for the barrier coats. If the weather improves tomorrow we will paint!