Painting Bottoms

Maine lobster men are a cantankerous bunch.  Their job isn't an easy one.  But they all used to have one thing in common: they needed to scrape and paint their boat bottoms every summer (back when their boats were wood, not today's plastic).

Simple - you run your boat up to the shore somewhere at high tide.  Then you wait for low tide.  With 10 foot tides, this completely exposes the hull, and voila, slap the bottom paint on.  The trick here is you all sit on one side of the boat to tilt it to starboard for one tide, then the other side to tilt it to port the next tide.

I had the pleasure of helping a great family friend do this one summer.  At 14 years of age, it was quite the adventure.

I have his thank-you letter to this day.