So far this 2024 boating season, most of my activity involving the boat has been trying to keep it clean. Actually, most all of the boat is covered, except the Whaler Drive and the engine midsection and gear case. I got the boat out of indoor storage in early June. I confess, it was not perfectly clean when I put it away, but after sitting in the driveway, outdoors, for June, July, and almost three weeks of August, the Whaler Drive needed a very serious cleaning. The problem was bugs, or rather dead bugs, and actually very small dead bugs.
These no-see-um pests seem to be attracted to the Whaler Drive, land on it, and if there is any moisture from rain or morning dew, cannot fly away. They die. Then the sun bakes their remains into little black dots that are very strongly attached to the gel coat. The longer they sit baking in the sun, the more strongly they get attached.
A favorite place for them to go to die is in the very small depressions of the non-skid pattern on the two outer swim platform areas of the Whaler Drive. Another favorite place is the deep engine splashwell on the Whaler Drive. At each drain there is a slightly deeper depression surrounding the drain, and if you added 25 dead bugs, maybe a few blown-in leaves, do not disturb for a week, and bake in the sun, you get a wonderful brown-bug-soup.
What I am saying here is the boats get dirty by things falling out of the sky: bugs, blown debris, and that old favorite, bird poop. You see, the boat is parked on its trailer about 100-feet inland from Lake Michigan, so there are plenty of gulls (white tern gulls) flying around and doing some target practice.
Last week I began an all-out assault on the dirt on the Whaler Drive. I divided the Whaler Drive into about one-foot sections measured across the beam, and started trying to remove the remains of hundreds and hundreds of dead bugs.
I tried several cleaners, several brushes, some scrubby-sponges (on both the sponge side and the scrubby side), and over the eight days I worked on this my method evolved and my efficiency improved. The final method was to use a very small flat blade miniature screwdriver as a scraping tool. If a bug spot was fairly new, a gentle nudge would usually pop-off most of the bug from the gel coat, leaving only a stain behind. This worked well on the areas that did not have a non-skid pattern. In the non-skid, I would hold the screwdriver perfectly vertical with the blade aligned to the direction of the pattern, and gently run the blade back and forth in the channel to encourage any bug remains to let loose. To do this you have to get very close to the non-skid so you can see the pattern clearly. Some strong light coming in at an angle helps. I got quite good at this method, and I could rapidly remove many dead bug black dots, but they usually left some stain behind.
The stain resisted all sorts of solvents, like my favorite "multi-surface cleaner" 409, even letting it soak on some bad stains and then scubbing with the plastic-mesh side of the scrubby-sponge. That would not work on the worst stains.
I finally resorted to using a liquid abrasive sold as glass cooktop cleaner under the name Cerama-Bright (or similar). Applying this on a wet surface (which dilutes the abrasiveness quite a bit) would remove most stains. For the very worst and hardest to clean stains required a dry surface and direct application with a more course scrub pad.
After eight days, the Whaler Drive is literally bug-spot-less. The only problem is the gel coat: it is now 34-years-old and while clean, it needs some polish and wax. I found that all the gel coat polish and boat wax I had been using were now empty or dried up, so I need to get new products. And I need to get on the polish and waxing job before the bugs launch another attack.
Right now, every morning I go out early to brush off the bugs. The past several days have been very windy, which I think keeps the bug swarm away, and there has been no dew or rain in the past few days, which keeps the gel coat dry. This helps reduce bug mortality on the Whaler Drive gel coat, and generally I can just brush off most of the bugs. Some of them are really almost microscopic size, just tiny little dots. I wouldn't be able to even see them except the Whaler Drive is now completely clean and stain free, so they show up.
Then I repeat the bug inspection in the afternoon, and later in the evening. I have to keep the Whaler Drive clean until I get a chance to polish, buff, and wax. It took eight days of work to get the darn Whaler Drive clean, so I do not want to lose ground to the bugs again.