Practical Boat Owner (Britain's biggest selling boating magazine) toasts the success of Coppercoat™!

In the December 2007 edition of Practical Boat Owner, the editor Sarah Norbury extolls the virtues of Coppercoat™ after a 14-year test on her family boat, a Starlight 39 (moored in the Hamble).

She writes: "One of the most frequently asked questions from PBO readers is "Should I invest in Coppercoat™ antifouling?" So I thought I'd share with you some news from what might be the longest test of Coppercoat™ on a yacht there has ever been. When we ordered a new Sadler Starlight 39 just over 14 years ago, we weren't intending for her to be a copper antifouling test bed, but somehow, that's what she's become!

Until this Autumn she's never been out of the water for more than 12 hours a year, so our 14 year test really is 14 years, not just 14 summers.

As an experiment we painted the rudder in three vertical stripes: one in Coppercoat™ and two in different top-of-the-range antifoulings. As time went by we regretted this test, beacuse each year we were faced with re-coating the antifouled stripes, whereas the Coppercoat™ just went on working from year to year. However it did show that ageing Coppercoat™ performed as well as new antifouling.

Our experience with Coppercoat™ has been fantastic. In all the 14 years we've never had a barnacle, seaweed, nothing except a thin layer of brown slime that simply washes off. It is recommended that each year the Coppercoat™ should be lightly abraded  to expose fresh copper to the surface, but we have never done this simply because we've never had the boat out of the water for long enough and it would be hard work!

The original claim for our Coppercoat™ was that it would last 10 years and many people were sceptical. Our test proves the doubters wrong and we're crossing our fingers our Coppercoat™ will keep doing it's job for many more years."