Commission a local canvas artisan to make a cover to your specifications. I would anticipate the cost will be in the range of $1,000 to $1,700. A good material is Glen Raven Mills SUNBRELLA in their color PACIFIC BLUE. Boat canvas made with this material will have an excellent service life.
Choose the local artisan by looking at his prior work. Often you can find a particularly good local canvas artisan by visiting local marinas and looking at boat canvas. Usually a good artisan will put his name on his work in the form of a sewn-on label. Interview other local boaters in your area and seek their recommendation for a local artisan. Local canvas artisans who do excellent work at reasonable prices will often have a long waiting list of clients, so expect to find the best local artisan might be booked up for several months (or even a year) in advance.
To hold down the outer edges of the hull cover to the boat, use the Wm. J. Mills & Co. curled hook fittings to hold the canvas down under the rub rails by a draw string in the hem of the cover. Or use snaps on the slanted portion of the gunwale.
- Fig. 1. Boat cover made by local canvas artisan to custom specifications. This cover had to fit to snaps already installed for the weather canvas. The existing snaps on the windshield frame were able to slide to fit the canvas, but the artisan converted all the sliding snaps to fixed locations. The existing weather canvas pieces (the windshield and two side curtains) and the new cover all fit perfectly onto the new fixed snaps. The workmanship and design of the new cover was excellent.
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Shown above is a boat cover I had made about two years ago at a cost of $1,100. The cover was made by a local canvas shop. I found this vendor by visiting several local marinas and looking at the canvas on boats in those marinas. I noted that many boats had very nice canvas made by one particular shop. I contacted the shop and inquired about making a custom cover. The shop had a backlog of work for about four months. I agreed to leave my boat there on its trailer for as long as a month, so the shop could work on my cover whenever they had some down time on other, larger projects. They completed the cover in about three weeks. I am very pleased with their work. The material is SUNBRELLA from Glen Raven Mills in their classic PACIFIC BLUE color.
In the above photograph you can see the under-gunwale curved hooks (that were invented by Wm. J. Mills & Co. for Boston Whaler canvas) located under the rub rail and above the black hull stripe. Those hooks are used on a different boat cover, a heavy, canvas, winter-storage cover the covers the entire boat topsides. That cover has elastic cord (bungy cord) straps sewn in at the appropriate locations to be looped under the curled hooks to hold down the outer edges of the cover. Since that cover is only installed when the boat is on land and on the trailer, there is no problem to put the straps under the hooks by working outside of the boat. The mooring cover that is shown above is designed to be easier to install from working inside the cockpit, and uses the conventional snap fasteners.