If you’re deciding between Aqua Pro and Barnacle King for a routine bottom clean, the honest answer is that on a 38-footer at Dinner Key with two months of soft slime, both of us will hand you a boat that looks the same from the dock. The difference shows up six months later, in how much bottom paint you have left, whether your shaft zincs got replaced before they disappeared, and whether anyone bothered to reach into the bow thruster tunnel.
We’re not going to invent facts about Barnacle King
People ask us to compare, and every “comparison” post that lists a competitor’s supposed failures is usually made up. We don’t know who Barnacle King has in the water this week, what pads they carry, or how they handle a boat at Sunset Harbour with a hot shore-power pedestal. So here’s a more useful version: the five questions that actually separate hull cleaners in Biscayne Bay, plus our own answers, in writing, so you can hold us to them and ask the other outfit the same thing.
Question one: what pad are you putting on my bottom paint?
This is the one that costs real money. An ablative like Micron CSC is designed to wear away — that’s how it works — so a stiff bristle brush or an aggressive stainless pad on a fresh ablative bottom will pull off a season’s worth of copper in one afternoon and leave a green cloud drifting through the slip. Hard modified epoxies like Trinidad Pro tolerate more scrub, which is why some boats at Bahia Mar get away with rough treatment for years and a Grady-White in Coconut Grove doesn’t.
Our divers carry a range of pads and match them to what’s on your hull, softest first, and we scrub soft growth off rather than blasting it. If a diver can’t tell you what type of paint is on your boat after the first visit, that’s your answer.
Question two: is it the same diver every month?
Continuity is worth more than anything on a price sheet. A diver who has been under your Sea Ray at Crandon Park Marina for eight months knows that your port shaft zinc wastes faster than starboard, that there’s a nick in the leading edge of the number-two blade, and that your strut bearing had a little play in April. A rotating cast of subcontractors notices none of that and reports none of it. Aqua Pro has been running the same operation since 2004 with NAUI-certified divers, and our crew is bilingual, which matters more than people expect when your captain and your diver need to sort out a running gear issue over the phone.
Question three: compare the interval, not the price per visit
Anyone can be cheaper by coming less often. In August, surface water in the bay sits in the mid-80s and barnacles set on an unattended hull in roughly three to four weeks. Stretch to quarterly and your diver isn’t cleaning — he’s chiselling hard growth off soft ablative, and that scraping takes paint with it. You save on a couple of visits and pay for it at the yard.
Our pricing is straightforward so you can do the math against anyone: $4 per foot for boats 20 to 50 feet, $5 per foot from 60 feet up, paid after the job is done. Zincs, prop work and running gear get quoted on site, because a set of shaft and nut anodes on a twin-screw 45 is a different conversation from a single trim tab anode. When you compare quotes, multiply by the number of visits per year each outfit is proposing, not per visit.
Question four: what happens to the parts nobody sees from the dock
The topsides of the hull are the easy part. The places that get skipped are the bow thruster tunnel, which packs solid with barnacles on boats that sit at Miamarina all summer; raw water intakes and speed transducers, where a single barnacle sets off your AC high-temp alarm at the worst moment; the underside of trim tabs; and the rudder shoe. Ask both companies whether tunnels and intakes are included or extra. Ask what percentage of zinc they consider “replace now” — we flag anodes around the half-worn mark rather than letting them vanish and start feeding your bronze.
Question five: what do you get if you weren’t at the dock that day
Most owners in Miami-Dade and Broward are not standing on the finger pier at 9am on a Tuesday. So the deliverable isn’t just a clean hull, it’s the evidence. We send before and after photos from every visit, and you pay after the work, not before. That’s the part where a comparison stops being marketing: ask for the last set of photos a company sent a customer with a boat your size, and see whether the running gear is in the frame.
Send us your slip, marina and boat length on WhatsApp at (786) 756-0304, or call (305) 978-1440, and we’ll tell you the price and the first available date.
