Coastal Transportation, based in Seattle WA is a family-owned shipping company that provides ocean freight and freezer service between Seattle, Western Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. Coastal has spent over 40 years operating vessels in some of the world’s harshest climates and understands the importance of maintaining their vessels to keep them on the water and looking great.
About a year before the M/V Coastal Trader was scheduled for her drydock, Coastal had another vessel (the M/V Coastal Standard) in for scheduled maintenance. It was during this drydock period that Coastal had its first experience with Tnemec’s line of coatings. The Coastal Standard had an exterior overcoat and deck rehab and used exclusively Tnemec’s coatings for the project. Both Coastal and the shipyard, Dakota Creek Industries of Anacortes, WA, loved the application of the products as well as the end results.
Scheduled to be hauled out for dry dock at Dakota Creek, the selection of the coating system for them was simple: Tnemec. At the time of the Coastal Trader’s drydock, John Fisker Anderson, Port Engineer for Coastal, commented on how the Coastal Standard still looked great even after a year of trips to and from Alaska. John mentioned that not only was the paint still looking good from a color and gloss standpoint, but the boat looked to be taking the mechanical damage much better than their previous paint manufacturer.
The surface prep plan was to power wash and hand scuff the exterior, then use hand tools on the heavy corrosion to get back to clean metal. The paint specification for the vessel included Series 394 PerimePrime zinc where needed, N69F Epoxoline II as the anti-corrosion primer, Series 1090 Excella-Shield as the urethane overcoat, as well as Tnemec’s HullClad™ anti-foul coating system under the waterline. The exterior decks were extremely pitted from the years of salt water exposure, so Tnemec’s marine underlayment was used to help level out the decks and give them a strong level base to accept the non-skid system as well as provide some additional protection in the higher traffic areas of the vessel.
After the complete washdown of the vessels the decks were first up for the shipyard to tackle. Dakota Creek’s paint crew attacked the decks with a track blaster to bring the decks down to an SSPC-SP 10. The entire deck was primed with Series N69F for corrosion protection. After taping off the areas to receive the decking, the underlayment was applied using a notched squeegee. The average thickness was about 1/8”, 80-100 mils, and with the self-leveling properties of the underlayment, the application went quickly and was very easy for the shipyard to apply.
After the decks were coated, the shipyard moved on to the bottom paint. Coastal went with the complete HullClad system. The bottom was cleaned using a 3500 PSI UHP washer and then hand- and power-tooled where needed. The areas that were down to metal were spot primed with Series 190 Epoxy Primer, and next a tie coat of Series 191 HullClad TC was applied. Series 191 keeps the overcoat windows for the anti-foul coating open for much longer. No more applying your anti-foul coatings to a tacky epoxy; Series 191 gives you a 5-day overcoat window to apply the anti-foul. Series 195 HullClad CU was the anti-foul chosen by Coastal. This choice will give them 5 years of a clean hull with the slow release of biocides provided within the coating. The shipyard did a quick stripe coat over the tie coat, and then came back with a full coat of Series 195 across the bottom.
After the hull was complete, it was time to move on to give that beautiful Coastal blue a nice refresh. Here, since this was all above the waterline, a zinc primer was used in areas down to bare metal to give added corrosion protection to the coating system. Once all the bare steel was spot primed with Series 394, Series N69F epoxy, and followed by a full finish coat of Series 1090 Excella-Shield. The shipyard noted how well the Series 1090 looked and was covered in a single coat.
Once the painting was completed, the vessel was dropped back in the water and was on its way to supply much-needed freight services to the Pacific Northwest.