Marin's recent thoughts on painting a glass GB got made me thinking. I am not going to run through my Awlgrip paint experience on my GB42 woodie of 14 months ago again because it has been posted here and in the GB forum. I understand his thoughts on using the boat versus sweating possible damage to a "perfect" hull, but some day he may will want to paint the boat, even if just for a sale. The paint job you can do then can be VERY good and inexpensive compared to the boatyard version. I personally can't rationalize a dinged up hull, but that doesn't mean keeping up a painted surface has to be excessively expensive. I would strongly recommend NOT letting any boatyard have a lot of your hard-earned dollars to prep and paint the boat when the time comes. For that matter, don't let them have any more than lay day money while YOU paint her. While I got away with doing my own boat for about $500, I DO NOT recommend doing it from a paint float like I did (I was alone for 90 percent of the time too). That's just for idiots like me. I probably would have paid $500 just for half the required lay days here (2 bucks a foot per day - lessee, that's about six days, not including the other haul and blocking costs). Due to weather and having to go to work and waiting between coats to re-sand, the whole job took me a month. I think I could have prepped, filled, sanded, filled again, sanded again, and painted two coats in two weeks in the yard with adequate scaffolding and no other help. With a helper, I would cut that estimate by 1/3. With two helpers - one half. Working from a homemade float caused some errors requiring extra coats of paint (see bulwarks comment below), but I was sort of happy to have more than the two required coats in those areas. For a grooved hull like our GBs, the grooves turn out to be a godsend when repainting. Just try to do a roll and tip job on a broad, uninterrupted surface like the fwd bulwark areas of a GB to see what I mean. Smooth-hulled boats have got to be a real challenge for roll and tip jobs. I ended up with four coats of Awlgrip on both the exterior bulwarks before I was happy, but each coat (per side) only took 30 minutes to apply and about 30 minutes to wet sand a day later if I wanted to hit it again. The grooves in the hull proper provide a defined area which lets you run down the hull one or two strakes at a time. Hand-sanding the grooves with a bit of sand paper wasn't overly tiring, especially after the first go-round with high-build Epoxy. Then apply the two-part polyurethane paint of your choice into the grooves with a barely wet brush a few feet ahead of where you are rolling the paint. The rolling converter and thinners allow one to work the paint for a relatively long time; so you can do it alone by "grooving" a little and rolling a little all the way down the hull. Then ratchet up a notch like and, like an old typewriter, run down the hull again. The job is less daunting than one might think and thus easier to enjoy knocking about in the boat afterwards than in a high-dollar boatyard job. That said, my own job is better looking than either of the previous two boatyard spray paint jobs I had done (we did all the prep then too). Remember, high-build Epoxy filler is your friend during prep and subsequent repairs. One day, several months later, I had the boat out to bottom paint and finish off the boot top when I got a side-long glance at the hull with floodlights glaring at an angle off the paint. I noted an area about 4 feet long on two strakes that was a bit orange-peeled. I whipped out some sand paper and about 3 ounces of paint and in no time had it glossy as a new car. You cannot find where I did it - grooved hull advantage. The thousands of dollars saved will go toward cruising fuel. Doin' it myself Rich Gano CALYPSO (GB42-295) Southport, FL