The owner of this Cal 25 contacted us to have a winter sailboat cover made for their boat which was being moved to Sagatuck, MI. The winters on the great lakes can be cold and snow fall totals can be in excess of 12″ per event. Instead of draping canvas over the boom and the rest of the hull we fabricated a heavy galvanized steel frame that would sit over all of the rigging and then rest outside of the lifelines. This would ultimately keep the cover off the Cal 25 sailboat itself but also allowed over 6′ of headroom underneath the cover to perform any maintenance or prep work before next season began.
The frame itself acts as a skeleton on top of the boat with a spine and then ribs supporting the winter sailboat cover. For practical purposes of installing and removing, the spine is broken into multiple pieces and joined. Each rib is fitted to spine with a through joint tightened down via screws. The equally spread out weight of the frame assists in stabilizing itself making it an extremely solid support structure. With rubber tips at the bottom of each rib the hull is protected from scratching.
The cover is split into a large forward and aft section adjoining together with a doubled up zipper and velcro flap. With the mast remaining up, we made small collars for each line, nine collars in total. The aft has an oversized access door that fully zippers down allowing large items to be moved in and out with the cover in place.
The beauty of our designs is the ease and quickness that the frame and cover can be installed. The frame is marked as to which pieces goes where and can be reconstructed in 30 minutes. The cover is then unfolded with all of the zippers securing around the mainstay lines. The collars to take time to zipper up and tie off but the install of the canvas should take another 1 hour. The bottom of the cover has connectors for lines made of webbing and not grommets which can scratch up the hull. It may take another 30 minutes to completely tie down the cover to the sailboat’s cradle. The goals is to have an easy to install / removed winter cover that be installed by 1 person in an afternoon.
