Desert Storm Tan Repaint

Over the last few years I have been painting the skins of my skin on frame boats with polyurethane varnish.  The varnish has UV blockers in it that protect the synthetic boat fabric from degradation by the UV.  The fabric I use is either nylon and of  late, mostly polyester.  Both get degraded by UV more or less equally.  Degradation means the fiber loses its flexibility and strength and crumbles into dust.  This is not a good thing in a boat skin and so it must be prevented.
In the past, I would try to touch up the varnish.  That worked for a little while but new polyurethane does not adhere well to old polyurethane.  The touch up varnish when exposed to sunlight for about a year starts to peel off.

Heres the original latex painted boat,  exposed to full sun for over two years already with no visible damage to the paint.

The solution as it turned out is latex paint.  Latex paint sticks to degraded polyurethane varnish and it effectively blocks UV radiation and it also is more flexible than polyurethane and does not crack.  Coincidentally, the polymer used in latex paint is acrylic, same stuff that they make UV resistant fabric like Sunbrella out of. You might ask, why not just cover the boats in sunbrella.  Good question.  I suspect it has to do with the price of sunbrella.  And you still have to paint the stuff to make it waterproof.

Heres the King Island kayak about to get a coat of tan paint.  Note the previously yellowish varnish starting to turn a chalky white, a clear sign that is near the end of its life.

The paint I was using was free give-away stuff left over from repainting about an acres worth of commercial buildings in the neighborhood.  The commercial buildings have not peeled and neither have my boats.  Only drawback to this paint is its color, an unattractive sort of Desert Storm Tan.  Oh well, I also have four gallons of Gulf of Tonkin Gray.

And here is one of my baidarkas with a new coat of Desert Storm Tan or maybe it should be called, Afghanis-Tan or would you prefer Afghanistan-Tan

In any case, I painted about 4 boats yesterday.  Six left to go.

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Mojave Desert Petroglyphs

The Mojave Desert has been inhabited by people for some time.  Like most places on earth, the Mojave desert has undergone climate change even before the advent of car exhaust.  But for the last few thousand years before the coming of Europeans, the Mojave has been a desert and has been inhabited by people looking something like those in the picture above.  The need for clothing was minimal and in the absence of clothing to decorate ones body, one could paint directly on ones skin.
Adorning of the body was a normal human urge.

The adorning of ones environment was also a natural human urge.  There is evidence of this throughout the world and the Mojave is no exception.  

Here is another example of this urge, this collection of petroglyphs being somewhere in New Mexico. 

Theories of what these petroglyphs signify abound but there is no clear agreement.  I personally think that the urge to mark ones environment is universal and needs no explanation, but others think differently.

The natives who have lived on this land since before the arrival of the Europeans do not agree with my theory. Author Kenneth Lengner interviewed various members of the Timbisha Shoshone who live in what is now called Death Valley and they told him that petroglyphs were not created by humans but rather by supernatural beings that they call rock babies.  In their view, since the petroglyphs are not created by humans, human urges cannot be said to be the cause of these petroglyphs.  So various anthropological explanations for the origins of the petroglyphs have no merit in their view.

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