[bporter]

We stripped 17 years of bottom paint off of my old C&C last spring. We used Dolphinite for chemical stripping much of it. The boat had a lot of paint on it, no fiberglass showing so your experience may be different.

The gotchas are:
- It isn''t cheap. We went through 5 Gals ($250) on a 37'' boat and did not complete the job.
- You need good protective gear
- It is a really foul and messy process
- You really have to use a LOT of it.

We found that some areas came right down to the fiberglass with zero effort, whereas in some spots it didn''t. Seems the spots where we put it on REALLY REALLY thick are the ones where the paint scraped off with no work at all. It also seemed that if you didn''t put enough on the first time it was almost harder to get it off later.

Eventually we ran out of time on the stripping job and had to have the yard finish it, but we did save a fair amount of money on them stripping it for us.

Basic rule of thumb was that you never had enough on it; you had to put it on so thick that it dripped off onto you. Try to put something with the consistency of Grape Jelly on the bottom of an almost horizontal surface! The whole time we were wishing we could turn the boat upside down.