Getting the salt off is a good thing. If you can wash down wherever you happen to be, great. The reality in a lot of places along the Pacific coast south of say, San Diego, is that you're at anchor or at a mooring a lot of times and fresh water, even non-potable fresh water, is in limited supply and has to be schlepped out to your boat in jerry cans or vidones (called garrafones in Mexico, IIRC). After a while south of the border how fresh water typically is used (and wasted) in US and some Mexican marinas, not that I've seen very many of the latter, will seem incredibly profligate. Of course, if you have a watermaker and are anchored/moored in a place where you can actually use it (water not fouled with petroleum), no problem with the water supply.
But if you have teak decks, it's best to wet them down daily with salt water, if at all possible. As Norm said, put zincs on, to protect your prop and bronze through-hulls. Some boats are set up to accept a plate zinc on the hull as well as a doughnut or collar zinc on the prop shaft. If you don't connect to shore power you eliminate or substantially reduce the galvanic corrosion problem. You'll need some sort of bottom paint appropriate to the waters where you'll be spending a lot of time, as marine growth will attach itself to your hull around and below the waterline quickly (rate depends on where you are). Which paint is "best" turns into a religious argument pretty quickly; what you have now might be OK, at least for a while. If you're in warm waters and will be at anchor or at a mooring for some time, like a few weeks or more, consider bagging your prop. Get one or two of those plastic shopping bags you get at the grocery store, and get one of those big, heavy-duty sacks such as potatoes or onions come in. Dive on the prop, put the plastic bags over the prop, securing them to the shaft as you will (zip ties, twine, etc), then over that put the much stronger potato sack. Tape a note to the ignition switch or wheel or something to remind you to take the bags off as one of your pre-departure items :-) For stainless, I've found that a good metal polish (I like Flitz and Brasso) will leave a protective film on the metal that lasts for a while. Also, as a last step, try wiping down stanchions, turnbuckles, etc., with a rag moistened with something like Corrosion X liquid (an incredible product, IMHO). That also resists the inevitable march of oxidation for quite a while (a couple or three months, or more). Having good stainless matters,of course. My stanchions and other good stuff showed virtually no oxidation after cleaning and wiping down as described above when I returned to the boat after six months of land travel; the stainless steel I bought in Panama, which received the same cleaning and final coating, had plenty of oxidation spots. The latter was likely Chinese stuff, probably 304 and not very good 304 at that, and was all I could find at the time for the small project I was then working on. I don't know if this is unique to salt-water environments, but it never hurts to put some anti-corrosion stuff (Corrosion X or Corrosion Block (which also comes in a grease form) or Lanokote or even just petroleum jelly) on battery terminals and electrical connections, especially ground connections. Seems that ground connections get funky faster than others, at least on my boat. Don't know why. But when something electrical doesn't work or works erratically, cleaning up the ground connection seems to solve the problem about 75% of the time. There are a few thoughts; others will no doubt have a multitude of further suggestions and opinions. HTH, Phil s/v Cynosure Bahia de Caraquez _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
