A Day in Deltaville
Tuesday 18th May 2021
We are anchored in Fishing Bay on the south side of the Deltaville peninsula and I have to say it’s a terrific anchorage. It’s picturesque, well protected from most directions (a bit of a long fetch to the south) and the water is dead flat. In fairness there hasn’t been any wind so perhaps it’s not really a fair assessment.
As I’m sure our discerning readers will have noticed, Cotinga has been looking a little rough of late with a tasteless brown ICW induced “mustache” at her bow and other tannin induced staining along her hull. Before we had Cotinga repainted in 2013 we had found “On and Off” to be very effective at removing stains, but “On and Off” is a fierce product with hydrochloric, phosphoric and oxalic acid and is not really recommended for use with the AwlGrip paint that is on our boat, so we have been reluctant to use it, particularly given how expensive it was to get the boat pained. However, our paint job is now 8 years old and not looking quite as pristine as it once was and the staining really doesn’t improve things. We have learned that “AwlGrip” needs re-doing after 5-8 years if you want it to continue to look good and have realized that at some point in the not too distant future Cotinga will probably need re-painting. Having seen a number of excellent do-it-yourself paint jobs, we have decided that next time we are going to paint her ourselves. Given this background we were pretty much ready to go ahead with “On and Off”. Then whilst we were in Carolina Beach we saw a fellow boater cleaning his hull on the adjacent mooring with spectacular results and he showed us what he was using and actually gave us the remains of a bottle of a different product. “StarBrite Hull Cleaner” only has oxalic acid, a weaker acid than the hydrochloric and phosphoric, so we thought we’d give it a go and yesterday managed to buy a bottle at West Marine. I have to say that it isn’t a difficult job, you just wipe it on with a sponge and then wash off with water after 2 minutes. I went all around the outside of the boat in less than 2 hours and the hull now looks terrific. It made me think that we might be able to make our current paint job last several more years, particularly if we start to wax it every year. Again this is not recommended with AwlGrip – I think because the manufacturers would rather you shell out a fortune on a new paint job - but I gather from what I have read that it works perfectly well.
Anyway, after the success of our hull cleaning we took the folding bikes to the marina. The dock-master kindly invited us to tie up at a floating dock where it was much easier to offload everything. The town of Deltaville doesn’t really have a center, but we biked along the main road, stopped for lunch at a café, visited another of the many local marinas, walked around the nature park at the Maritime Museum and shopped for groceries. The Stingray Point marina was quite charming although the replica lighthouse was a bit underwhelming. Stingray Point was named after Captain John Smith, a famous early explorer of the Chesapeake area, who was accidentaly stung by a stingray as he attempted to stab it with his sword. He swelled up so much they thought he would die, but managed to pull through in time to eat the ray that evening. Sounds like my sort of guy – who’d let a little swelling get in the way of dinner?! We managed to buy some fresh produce at a local farm stand and the strawberries actually smell like the strawberries I remember as a kid – as opposed to totally odorless when you get them at the supermarket.
Well that’s it for now. We are having “left-overs” for dinner, probably followed by strawberries!
Mike
37 32.319 N, 76 20.152 W
No comments:
Post a Comment