U
BOAT DOCTOR ///BOAT DOC SPECIALTESTING, 1, 2, 3
Nothing mars Mom’s Mink
like mildew stains on the vinyl
seats and cushions. h ose black
dots and blobs look unsightly,
may cause the crew to stand
instead of sit, and cause your
boat to diminish in value.
MILDEW OR
MIL-DON’T?
When to fi ght mildew and when to give upUnfortunately, making
mildew-stained vinyl
look like new proves
nearly impossible —
and in some ways, it’s a
fool’s errand.
“Mildew is a fun-
gus,” explains Phillip
Liberson, president of
American Marine Can-
vas and Upholstery in
Miami. “You can cleanit of the vinyl’s surface
and kill the spores
with a disinfectant, but
unless you replace the
seat’s foam as well as
the vinyl covering, it
will come back. You’ll
get one season, maybe
two depending on
humidity and tempera-
ture, but just cleaning
the stains of won’t end
your mildew problem.”
If you don’t want to
spend the hard-earned
cash on replacing your
seats and you’re willing
to clean and reclean,
there are a number of
products you can choosePHOTOS: COURTESY TACO MARINE (2 HELM SEATS), LENNY RUDOW (4 INSETS)I deemed this extremely
mildewed cushion as needing
replacement one year ago. To
stretch its life span, surface stains
were eradicated with a healthy
dose of bleach. A year later, the
vinyl itself feels significantly less
supple, there is visible deterio-
ration in the stitching, and worst
of all, the mildew returned with
a vengeance. To compare the
effectiveness of bleach versus
a vinegar/water mix versus
a dedicated mildew cleaningproduct, we hit the left side of
the cushion with bleach a second
time, used the vinegar/water mix
on the center section, and tried
a scrub-down with chlorine- and
bleach-free Iosso Mold & Mildew
Stain Remover on the right side.
To our surprise, the Iosso worked
almost as well as the bleach, and
both worked far better than the
vinegar mix, though overall the
effort was clearly something of
a failure. It’s time to replace the
cushion entirely.FUNGUS
AMONG US
The difference
between stained
and stain-free seats