Tin, once the standard antifoulant, gets banned worldwide. Though a few boats flirt with new technologies, copper keeps most hulls clean. A few years ago, I was working on a crabber tied up in Dutch Harbor, the boats so thick we could leap from oneto the other. Suddenly the skipper of the boat next to us leaned over his gunwale and cursed us up and down for scratching his 40,000 dollar paint job. Everyone scrambled to stuffbuoys between the hulls. Those were plusher times for the Bering Sea crab fleet, when a decision to spend money on maintenance wasn't such a hand-wringing affair. Still, the skipper had obviously given his boat the best paint job he could, and he was right to be angry. Top-notch marine paint work costs a good deal of money. Thealternative is fouled hulls, rust-blotched decks, and more time spent in drydock. In fact, the marine coatings industry "doesn't talk about painting boats anymore," says Fred Clemens, a marine technical representative for Cam Coat Industries of Burnaby,British Columbia. "We talk about property protection."
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