We finished the first coat of paint today and laid out the anchor chain and remarked it. And FedEx tracking says our transmission was delivered to the repair shop in New Jersey this afternoon. Progress!

We described the last time we did our bottom in Bottom Job Blues (it was fun to re-read and the tune is still appropriate!). We were very pleased with the performance of our Interlux Ultra bottom paint. It was going on its 31st month, and still had quite a bit of life left in it. If we hadn’t been hauling out to pull our transmission, we probably would have put off doing the bottom again for another six or eight months and achieve our goal of doing our next bottom somewhere down island. Interlux has apparently stopped making Ultra, but the replacement, called Ultra-Kote, still has the extremely high copper content that we prefer (they say it’s the highest available in any paint). They just dropped the Biolux biocide, probably for environmental reasons. Hopefully this bottom will take us through the next three years of cruising. 🙂