Just relating my experience painting Touche' a couple years ago. Touche' has always been on Lake Pontchartrain and is/was a boat well known in the area. A couple older sailors told me that one of the previous owners had hired the local boatyard's painter over a weekend to paint the boat. Rumor was they careened Touche' alongside a bulkhead by putting an anchor in the grass out from the bulkhead and heeling it with a halyard and winch. The painter worked from a dinghy. The next day, they spun the boat and painted the other side. No one seemed to know what paint was used. The most common guess was Imron.
I originally thought about painting the boat myself. The boat was in a yard where a contractor who had just done the bottom. The painting contractor had looked at the existing topsides paint and commented that something didn't look right about it. It had numerous "fisheyes", small pinhead sized holes in several areas. He said that could be due to several underlying causes; improper surface preparation, improper solvent use, etc. He is well respected. I listened to him and decided to let him spray the boat after I prepped it. He was great to work with and offered a lot of good advice. I opted to use red Awlcraft 2000 paint which is somewhere north of $200/gallon. We didn't want to screw this project up at those prices. He suggested I prep the old paint by scrubbing it with Comet with a DA polisher then sanding with 320 grit. I dutifully took 2 days to do it. We then taped off a test area. He had just sprayed another boat with white Awlcraft 2000 and came over to shoot the test area. Almost immediately after he applied the Awlcraft, the existing paint began to peel up, the white Awlcraft blended with Touche's existing red to form an awesome pink and some of the new Awlcraft simply beaded up on top of the existing paint. Not good. I spent 2 more days with a Hutchins sander removing whatever the heck paint(s) was on the boat. I went through at least two layers of old paint before turning it over to the contractor. He applied 3 coats of high build primer before he felt comfortable enough to apply the Awlcraft. He said the first coat still seemed to react with the underlying paint(s). In the end, the boat looks fabulous. Moral of the story: Don't assume you can just spray on some paint. You need to either know what paint you're covering or do a lot of prep and use a really good primer. Also, if you need to sand above the waterline, consider using a Hutchins sander. A disc sander requires a very, very steady hand to not rock it and leaves gouges. Even the smallest gouge or depression will show when using high gloss paint. Dennis C. Touche' 35-1 #83 Mandeville, LA
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