When we bought our boat 5 years ago, the Tan canvas bimini top had just been replaced. Before we went on our Great Loop trip, we had the Bimini top re-stitched because the thread was starting to come undone. We also had our top flybridge cover replaced by a guy who was living on his boat at our marina and did canvas work. He was a bit of a character (always showed up to our boat with a beer in his hand, even first thing in the morning) The resulting cover was functional but didn’t really hold up very well, we had it done in Tan to match the bimini. The good news is that it was cheap!
We also bought a gas grill cover to cover our helm chair (grey), and an off-the-shelf cover for our dinghy (which didn’t fit very well) that was another shade of grey. So we had three colors of covers on the flybridge.
When we replaced the table on the flybridge with a new one, Brenda made a cover for it with some brown vinyl tablecloth material. Quite the color pallet!
While we were in St. Petersburgh in February, we ordered new seat cushions for the flybridge. Again, they were original from when we bought the boat, and the foam inside had started to deteriorate so we had little bits of yellow floating out every time we moved the cushions. They were finally ready and we picked them up in April!
After we got our new cushions the rest of our multi-color canvas looked very shabby. There were green mold stains in places, and we could see light through the canvas bimini roof. We looked around and found a marine canvas person who lives just one canal over. We gave Alpha Marine Upholstery a ring, and Yevgeny came right over to see the project and give us an estimate, which was very fair for the work involved, and he suggested several enhancements. We were expecting to have to wait weeks or even months like we did for our cushions. We got lucky because he had a large project that was scheduled, however, the boat was late getting down to our area due to some mechanical issues. So he was able to start work the next day!
Yevgeny and his wife came to measure and take patterns. They brought samples of fabrics for Brenda to confirm that those were the colors she wanted.
A week later, they came back with the rough-stitched covers and did a test fitting. A few days later, they came back with the finished covers and did the final install. The result was amazing! The boat looked SO much better with the new covers. In the end, we got a new bimini top, a new cover for the flybridge, new covers for the upper helm chair and the flybridge table, new covers for the winch motors on the mast, and a new cover for the dinghy! Also, we found a cover for the grill that matched our new covers exactly.
Does anyone remember the story of The Magic Geranium? Since then we’ve also replaced our worn dock lines with matching dark blue lines, and got new, slightly larger dark blue fenders too now it’s all nicely matched and my CDO is satiated (CDO is like OCD except that the letters are in alphabetical order like they should be!.
We were very pleased with the work, and for around $5,000, we feel we got excellent value for our money!
Thanks for visiting! –Tom & Brenda
