If you're anything like me, you probably spend quite a bit of your time surfing the Web looking at boats. I've been accused of spending an "inordinate" amount of time doing so, but that implies that my time would be better spent doing something else. I can't imagine what that other thing would be, other than actually riding around in boats searching for fish.

During my online research sessions, I often see older boats referred to in glowing terms with captions that shout out, "Totally refurbished just last year!" But when you read the fine print, you discover that "refurbished" just means new carpet and a paint job. The 20-year-old diesels still belch smoke and need a rebuild, and the port transmission slips a little, but by golly, she's shining like a new penny. 
 
What's really amazing is how often that sales approach works! Mechanical problems seem remote and esoteric to some folks, but a dull and lifeless hull jumps right out at you and can kill the sale of even a mechanically sound boat. There's no doubt that a fresh coat of paint can make even the most rode-hard-and-put-away-wet charter boat look like she just came off the showroom floor.

If you have a boat that needs painting, there's a lot of research to do — painting a boat's exterior is a complicated process usually best left to professionals, but going in armed with a bit of knowledge will enable you to get the best paint job at the best price.
 
The first thing you need to understand is that labor stands out as the biggest cost involved. Preparing a boat for painting is a huge undertaking and technical know-how is paramount. "When painting a boat, the paint costs $1 of every $10 you spend, and labor accounts for the other $9," says David Halcomb, vice president and general manager of Awlgrip North America. In order for a hard polyurethane paint to dry completely smooth, it must be applied to a surface that's been thoroughly cleaned, sanded and faired properly.
 
I learned that lesson the hard way many years ago. I owned a 17-foot Hewes Bonefisher that desperately needed a paint job. A painter friend and I stripped the boat and went to work sanding the hull with progressively finer sandpaper. We spent three weeks sanding and washing the hull down with acetone until we both swore it was as smooth as the proverbial baby's rear end.

My buddy, who knew how to work a spray gun, shot the hull with Awlgrip, and when the paint dried, the shiny new coat looked like the calves of an 80-year-old — covered in a web of varicose veins. Tiny, virtually invisible scratches and cracks sucked the hard paint down, forming a web of unsightly trails all over the hull. We had simply not sanded enough, and after sanding off the new paint, we started again. The boat eventually sported a beautiful, scratch-free paint job, but not until after we created a ton of extra work for ourselves.
 
Marine coatings come in one-part and two-part formulations and have a polyurethane base. (You can apply one-part paints right out of the can, but they are much less durable than two-part paints.) Higher-end paints dry slower and are much more technically challenging to apply. You must add catalysts to two-part paints to make them harden at an acceptable rate, and you have to take variables like temperature and wind into account when mixing the formula.
 
You can choose between a couple of different kinds of polyurethane paints — polyester-based polyurethanes and acrylic-based polyurethanes. "Acrylic paints came from the automotive industry," said Tripp Nelson, sales and marketing manager for Alexseal. "Acrylic paints dry faster and are more easily repaired, but they're not as durable as polyester-based paints."