I now have three coats of brilliant white deck paint on the floor of the Mirror cockpit, and in the forward “lockers”, which will hopefully make it easier to find things in there when we’re on the move. If I do say so myself, it looks quite smart. So much so that it shows up the state of the painted hull – but that is going to have to wait until the end of the season – I do want to get some sailing done this year!
The deck paint has turned out to be quite strange stuff; I think it’s some sort of enamel. It goes on well enough, but as it dries it goes slightly streaky. It’s only with the third coat that I feel I’ve finally got decent coverage.
The question now is do I need to make it non-slip too? Currently it’s a sort of glossy finish, which looks quite attractive. If I want to make it non-slip then I have to mix some glass beads (which are so small as to look almost like sand) into the paint that forms the final coat. At the moment I’m not convinced this will actually help much. When I was sailing it last year with the old non-slip deck coating I still slipped over a few times; the only apparent effect of non-slip coating was to make the resulting grazes on my knees that much worse.
Perhaps I’ll put one last coat of deck paint on late tonight, and ignore the non-slip thing, at least this time around.
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