Boat Detailing questions, answered

Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Southern Shores, Duck, Corolla and Manteo, plus the surrounding northern Outer Banks, and we cover the slips and racks around Hatteras, Buxton and Avon as well — ask before you book, because the travel changes the day and the availability changes with the season. Wherever the boat is, we come to it: at a slip, at a rack, at a yard, or on a trailer.

For a boat, it is a difference in the water and everything that follows from it. The ocean side is full-strength salt, roughly 35,000 parts per million, and it will strip a hull and eat hardware. The sound is different — Pamlico Sound is very shallow, averages five to six feet deep over eighty miles, and takes freshwater from the west and ocean salt through the inlets in the east, so it is brackish. Brackish water grows its own particular marine life, and it is a different cleaning job from an ocean-side hull.

A hull clean and wax twice a year for a boat that lives in the water, and once a year for a boat that is stored. The wax is not stopping growth — it is protecting the gelcoat, the topsides and the brightwork from the salt and the sun, and on this coast one coat a year leaves the finish going chalky and pale. For a boat that sits through the winter, the fall layup and the spring clean are the two that matter.

Yes, and we would rather do the whole boat than have you call someone else for the seating. The soft-canoe seating, the inflatable dock, the canvas and covers, the teak and the brightwork are all part of the same job, and doing them in one visit is cheaper and better than doing them in three. Tell us what the boat has and we will tell you what it needs — on a lot of boats some of it does not need doing at all this year.

We will look at it and tell you honestly. Tributyltin and organotin used as a biocide are barred from antifouling coatings, and a coating containing organotin has to be removed or overcoated. The Clean Hull Act is the same idea: a vessel may not bear an organotin antifouling system on its hull unless it carries an overcoating that forms a barrier to the leaching, with narrow carve-outs for sonar domes and conductivity sensors. Cybutryne coatings have to be overcoated effectively or removed.

Vessels of fourteen feet or more and every personal watercraft have to be titled in North Carolina, and all motorized vessels used on public waters have to be registered, along with sailboats longer than fourteen feet at the load waterline. A vessel from another state staying here for more than sixty consecutive days transfers its registration, and a federally documented vessel registers but is not titled by the state. The hull identification number is a twelve-character number, and anything built or imported after 1972 has to carry one.