Preparing the deck
There’s no doubt at all that for the best deck paint job, you should remove all the deck fittings. This gives you the biggest area to work in, protects the fittings and will give you the best possible results. However, removing jib tracks, winches, chainplates, stanchion bases, hatches, filler caps and cleats from a 35-year-old boat is a long job. With spring approaching rapidly, we decided to cut that particular corner and mask up and paint around the deck fittings. If carried out with care this would look OK, and would shorten the process considerably.
One of the major advantages of KiwiGrip is that it self-levels and will sit quite happily on top of a rough surface. That does mean you don’t need to sand back the deck coating completely smooth as the paint will fill any voids – although it will use more paint.
Sanding
We sanded the decks with 80-grit sanding discs in a random-orbital sander to remove as much of the old Interdeck as possible. A ‘mouse’ sander was useful for sanding around mooring cleats and other areas. We removed the anchor well locker lids as well as the lazarette lids in order to practise our technique back in the garage.
Masking up for KiwiGrip
With everything sanded, washed and dried, we were ready for the next stage – masking up. The main lesson we learned here was not to underestimate the amount of time this would take!
One tip that we wished we’d learned was to apply the tape in short sections, for reasons that would become very clear once we started painting. You need to remove the tape while the paint is still wet – and on a narrow foredeck with limited access, that means doing so as you go along. Short, 1ft sections of tape would