"KiwiGrip is a revolutionary, durable, non-skid coating that spreads quickly and easily with our proprietary roller, offering a beautiful, high traction surface. By varying the application technique, the texture can be adjusted from a rolled "pleasure boat" texture to an industrial aggressive "work boat" texture. As a homogeneous material, KiwiGrip doesn't suffer from the problems encountered with products filled with sand, walnut shells, beads, rubber fleck, or other fillers. Coatings with fillers tend to wear through, and the fillers fall out leaving an unsafe deck that's hard to clean and even harder to re-coat."

Kiwi Grip

Kiwi Grip is a non toxic water based paint that you use for your non skid deck grip. Other brands and types of non skid paints use granules of sand, rubber, plastic and we have even heard of using sugar in the paint as it then dissolves leaving the non skid texture. Kiwi Grip makes use of it's own sponge like roller to create the desired course texture of the paint, instead of using additives.

We first re done the deck paint on Nandji before we left Australia in preparations for our first big passage. You can create what ever texture you desire with the paint and roller, it is all in the roller technique when spreading out the yoghurt like substance. We found it to be a very easy product to use and are very happy with the coarseness of the texture and the finished result. 

Being a water based paint, it was easy to clean up any spillages and those times you go out of the edge. This means the product is also environmentally friendly, which gets a big tick of approval from us.

To prepare the surface for the Kiwi Grip, we roughly sanded back the old deck grip and replenished primer in areas that needed it. Then it was just a matter of using masking tape to outline the areas to be painted and get going. We did a little practice run on a piece of cardboard to test out the roller and find what technique and texture we were after. Then we got stuck into splashing it all around and after a solid day of prep and paint, we were done. A little tip in the application is to ensure that you remove the masking tape whilst the product is still wet!

It has been over 18 months since we applied the Kiwi Grip and it has seen a lot of wear and tear and is still going strong. We will use this product again for sure and I reckon we could even do little patch ups if needed in areas. I will let you know how that goes when I do it!