Like an old 60\u2019s comedian coming out of retirement, I have returned to sailing to discover that the world has changed. The Environment has taken over.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure it\u2019s a good thing. In fact, as we shall see later, I am going to be doing my bit when it comes to putting an end to plastic waste at sea.<\/p>\n
But I was not prepared for what has happened to anti-fouling.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t seem that long ago that you got a bucket of water and some coarse wet & dry paper\u2026 and after half an hour, you hands, your clothes, your hair \u2013 not to mention the ground all around the boat was bright red \u2013 or blue \u2013 or black of whatever was the colour of the stuff you were rubbing off.<\/p>\n
Not any more. Now we know about \u201cGround Water\u201d and the effect of chemicals on micro-organisms.<\/p>\n
Quite how it was going to get into the water course through the tarmac of the hard-standing, was never explained. However, one thing was abundantly clear: Samsara\u2019s generous coating of TBT and Micron and every type of organotin constituted an environmental disaster (I have since looked it up and it quite put me off my fish supper).<\/p>\n
\u201cSo how,\u201d I asked Barry who had just imparted the dire warnings, \u201cam I supposed to get it off\u201d.<\/p>\n
The words \u201cSpecialist equipment\u201d and \u201cHazchem suit\u201d featured in the explanation \u2013 along with the news that he had everything that was needed, together with a fit young man who would be happy to spend a couple of days crawling around under the boat scraping away while a vacuum cleaner attached to the scraper sucked up all the toxins.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a wonderful system \u2013 and do you know what\u2019s wonderful about it? Cooking breakfast to the accompaniment of \u201cscrape-scrape-scrape\u201d coming through the hull, knowing you don\u2019t have to do it yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like an old 60\u2019s comedian coming out of retirement, I have returned to sailing to discover that the world has changed. The Environment has taken over. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s a good thing. In fact, as we shall see later, I am going to be doing my bit when it comes to putting an end to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[24,23],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antifouling","tag-hazchem-suit","tag-tbt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}