Dark Hulls

[oliverm]

Has anyone had experience with a dark hull in the islands. I am about to paint the topsides of my 42GB woodie and I would love to go dark green. However, I am very aware of all the warnings to keep the topsides white or risk the seams opening up in the heat of the tropics. So here is the question: sacred cow or good avide?
Thanks. Oliver

[Jay Greer]

Good advise! My own boat "Red Witch" has a dark red hull. If I didn't like the color so much I would paint it white as the dark hull is hell to maintain.
JG

[Dan McCosh]

From the experience when it gets over 85 degrees or so around here, a dark hull in the tropics could be a problem.

[Lew Barrett]

Look at Grand Banks Beige as a color option. Anything darker is going be harder.
Rita is beige and I wouldn't go a bit darker than that. Beige is nice though.
Lew

[Dan McCosh]

We've always had a dark green hull, with a deck that has been both white and beige. Even the beige is noticably hotter in the sun than white.

[maxima302]

From the experience when it gets over 85 degrees or so around here, a dark hull in the tropics could be a problem.

The same goes for cooler climates as well. I remember a quote from Sam Devlin (Wooden Boat Jan/Feb 2006) that a dark colored hull can be up to 30 degrees hotter in the sun then a white colored one. Even in cooler climates, such as the Northwest, where you have cool water, but a hot hull in direct sun, can pose problems. Especially considering the great sway in temperatures up in the NW that vary from night and day. But there is one thing for sure: A dark green hull on a GB42 would surely look stunning!

[oliverm]

Thanks, it is clear that practicality should take precedent over beauty. I will stay with a white.
Oliver

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

22 years ago I bought a black boat.

She had been black for 47 years.

She went grey

Then grey-blue

Then pale blue

Then pale buff

and finally the planks have stopped showing their seams annually.

Planking, btw, is teak.

I rest my case!

[EASLOOP]

I seems to be all down to optical physics really. White paint appears white because it reflects almost all of the light spectrum, i.e. all the colors that make up white. Dark paint, on the other hand, appears dark because it does not reflect all the light spectrum but only the dark frequencies. Therefore dark paint absorbs a lot of light energy and reflects very little. The darker the paint the less light is reflected. If the light is not reflected it must go somewhere - yep! into the paint (or the substrate). Dark hulls get really hot because they absorb those energy producing frequencies! I have a wooden boat. I painted it dark blue, then dark green (because it looked good), but now I have her in ivory - boy, what a difference - and that is in the UK's Medway River, to the east of London, where it is more cold and wet than anything else - until we started flooding the world with CO2 that is.

All the best,
John

[John Turpin]

Here in toasty Oklahoma, I can't even consider colors other than white. On a 100+ degree day, a darkly painted boat would almost certainly begin melting epoxy.

[Dan McCosh]

We are in a relatively cool climate most of the year, with low topsides and the hull is mainly shaded at the dock. That lets us get away with a dark green hull. Still on a hot day, the epoxy in the seams of the varnished hatches has let go once or twice.

[mmd]

One of my clients in the southern Caribbean wanted his "cattlemaran" (day-charter catamaran) hulls painted dark royal navy blue. After two season he came back to us to have the upper portions repainted white. Too many clients complained of burns on their bare skin when they sat on the dark-painted areas. While the boat was in our yard, I asked a fellow I knew to measure the hull temperature with his remote temp sensor. It registered something like 160 deg. F.

[Lew Barrett]

No question. The boat has to be really tight to pull off a color of any type, even here in the northwest. I wasn't suggesting that beige works like white (more like a light gray as far as absorption is concerned), but it's a color and if the boat is tight enough, and perhaps to add, if the circumstances allow, it's about as dark as I think one can reasonably hope to go without toasting the boat; and it will still probably be a bit more work.
If one wants to paint a wooden boat a color of any shade, it's my thought that the boat had better be in top shape, meaning really fair and tight. It's likely to be harder to keep even in a light value. Our coach tops and decks, where they aren't wood, are white. When we got the boat years ago they were barnagate (spelling?) brown. It made a noticable difference going to white; cooler inside in the summer.
There's undoubtedly a reason that boats have been usually painted white all these years. As I said, beige is as dark as I would ever go; not to imply it's the same as white.
Lew



We've always had a dark green hull, with a deck that has been both white and beige. Even the beige is noticably hotter in the sun than white.

[Nicholas Carey]

Here in toasty Oklahoma, I can't even consider colors other than white. On a 100+ degree day, a darkly painted boat would almost certainly begin melting epoxy.One thing I noticed in Nevada...

Cars appear to come in two colors: white and silver. You very seldom see any other color.

Draw your own conclusions :D

[hansp77]

After putting on two coats of a navy/midnight blue enamel on my topsides, during the middle of winter in Melbourne Australia, and wet and drying meticulously inbetween coats, I turned up to put the final topcoat on and I had bubbles occuring in a half dozen patches just under the gunwales on the sunny side.

I popped them and they instantly peeled back in whole big patches to raw wood.
Nightmare.
I resanded the whole hull, dried out the moisture in the bits that peeled, primed sanded primed sande etc. and then changed to a realy light powder blue.

No problems.

Now this probably happened because there was some moisture under there. But I am so glad it happened then. I don't want to know what it would have done in summer.
Hans.