Painting -- Boot Stripes Kick Me in the Pants

The road to painting has been a long one, a struggle that jeopardizes whether or not I can make it into the water this year.  Due to a global shortage of paint, I had to special order most of the paint and then work with whatever was left on the shelves at the Marine Store.  It was slim pickins at best.  And let me also give a quick shout out to the Marine Store salesperson who, when I asked if the Micro Extra Shark White was in stock, flatly told me that "they don't make bottomcoat in any color but black."

Now, I could accept any of the following answers:  "We don't have any other color but black,"or, "I've never seen any color but black," or even, "Shark White?  Did you make that up?"  But to state some Henry Fords-ian black-is-all-there-is is just plain misguided.  I mentioned this to the manager when I quickly abandoned the conversation with this salesperson and he only blinked a couple times and shook his head.  Within a few minutes, I had a special order Trilux33 white on the way up from West Palm Beach.

I got the Trilux33 down pretty quickly over the sanded primer fiasco from a couple weeks ago, let that dry, added two more coats, then moved onto the boot stripe.  Here, again, I wasn't planning a boot stripe but I think they do look pretty cool and I wasn't quite ready to flip the boat so I thought I'd might as well add a little flair to my little boat.

After some time trying to figure out how to trace a straight line, I decided to use the bottom blue topsides as a guide, mark off an inch from there with a strip of tape, leave the middle two inches bare, and then mark off the top inch.  That left two inches of striping.  I had some leftover Dark Blue topsides for once so the idea was to use that along the sides.  I first tested using two strips of frog tape (equaling two inches) but then switched to my two-inch roll which made it far easier.

 

 

I traced this pattern around around the boat and marked up the transom.  This took a couple hours as I really wanted this to look good.  Given how sharp a line I got with the topsides, I didn't think there'd be a problem with the blue stripe.

 

 

 

From a distance, it doesn't look too bad.  Some other blog says it's a "3-foot paint job" and that's about right.  But the first hint something was wrong when the paint was still tacky even 48 hours after painting.  This was really unusual given the warm weather, low-humidity, and how the topsides went down earlier.

 

As you can see, the paint bled through the frog tape and caused all sorts of little ripples along the white.  I can only think this happened because I put topside paint on a bottom coat paint (this was straight up painted on Trilux33 and not primer).  The paint mixed a little bit, didn't set right, and then leaked through.  Bummer.

I was almost inconsolable but my wife said it looked good, and no one's going to notice when the boat's in the water, and that this will all need to come off in 3 years or so when we redo the paint.  All of this is true, but it's no less painful.  I thought about sanding this over again but I'm out of paint and I am not/not dropping another $50 on this project.  Onto the bow eye and the centerboard.