Painting a Corribee Mk2

A tale of prolific boat owner Clive Marsh's Corribee Mk2 and a warning to wait a while before changing a boat's colour

- Clive Marsh

Clive's boats

CLIVE MARSH discovered small boats whilst working for Canadian Pacific Steamships and is a past Commodore of the Merchant Navy Association Boat Club. In this series he shares tales from his 50 years of boat ownership.

I found my Robert Tucker-designed Corribee at Tarquin’s Boat Yard in Emsworth which is now known as Emsworth Marina. She was out of the water sporting a very eye-catching bright yellow hull and appropriately named Petite Beure. She looked perfect in every regard apart from one thing, I didn’t then like yellow hulled boats. Still, this was a minor problem and I set about changing the hull to dark blue.

Painting a good GRP hull is really a bit daft. Not only does it have to be done with great care it will probably diminish the value of the boat when one comes to selling it. This is because the future buyer might think you’re hiding something. So it’s best to take pictures before painting and at each stage of the process.

Painting involves many stages and I decided to follow International Paint’s system and seek their advice at each stage of the process. Doing this paid off and the finished job looked great and as far as I know is still looking good.

The job took several days spread over a week and during this time I noticed that the young couple berthed next to me were preparing their 21ft sailboat for a repaint too. It was blue and while they rubbed it down I asked them what colour they were changing to. Yellow they said. They’d admired my boat so much that they wanted a yellow boat too! Such is life – we often want something different to what we already have.

Hand painting