I tarp our boat in a manner similar to you. Last winter I had even tied the grommets together under the boat but alas the wind still managed to whip it off a couple of times tearing out all of the grommets. This year I tarped it as usual but actually stitched the bow end (aimed west) closed with heavy twine to keep the wind from inflating the tarp. This year the tarp stayed on all winter.RussMT wrote:We had a nasty wind storm the other day. 100mph gusts, snapped 100 year old trees and lots of damage to houses and.......
my cover tore in half. This is year 4 for this cover and it's seen better days. This storm finished it off. I am, however, impressed that it didn't totally shred.
I think the lacing of the grommets under the boat like a giant sneaker is what kept it somewhat in place.
Time to take it off and get ready to splash her anyway.
It's PVC pipe from Lowes. Bend to a U shape. I attach it with duct tape. First I wrap the stanchion with a paper towel so it doesn't stick, then duct tape and tape to the pipe. You can get very creative with duct tape. They key is to wrap things with paper towels so it doesn't stick and can be removed with a knife at the end of the season. Pretty simple and has worked for years.tbowers wrote:Russ, what is that tubing you have on your decks? If to hold the cover up why is some of it arched 'horizontally' like a rail more than vertically to arch the cover so rain doesn't pool? And how is it attached to the deck?
Doh!Tomfoolery wrote:Hard to see in the pics, but I remove the lifelines so the snow can slide off, which it does most of the time. I also clean some snow off when I'm raking the roof, but that's just because I'm already there and doing it.
Thanks, but not that brilliant really. I just stood there last year, staring at the pockets of snow that were caught, and realized what was 'catching' that snow. The lifelines at the cockpit. So I took 'em off*. You can see in the pic where the bottom of the vee is where the goal post is. Some snow still does get held there, and if the tarp bags too much, stays there, but I could probably fix that with either a little more bracing**, or some ballast on the tarp ties to keep it from getting too baggy. 
Time to get rid of the cobbled bit of dross the PO installed. 
Without the lifelines, won't the stanchions simply poke right though the tarp?Tomfoolery wrote: Hard to see in the pics, but I remove the lifelines so the snow can slide off, which it does most of the time.
) but I leave my lifelines on and still have to cover my stanchion heads in blocks of styro so that they do not wear through the tarp - which they do anyway. On our lot at the club, they do get exposed to quite a bit of whipping wind for Canada's 6 month winter. 
