As I’ve mentioned before, it’s pretty much always sunny here in Florida.. and if the sun’s out, it’s HOT!  It gets worse on the boat if there’s nowhere to hide from the sun and with the afternoon thunderstorms, it’s even hard to leave the hatches open for the boat to cool down.  That’s where the boom tent comes in.  Lots of people make little shade tents to go over parts of their boat to block some of the sun and try to stay cooler.  Eventually we will have a bimini cover for the back of the boat that will connect the dodger to the rear arch, so I turned my attention forward.  My plan is to make a shade that will go from the jib sail back to the mast and then tie to the lifelines on the side.  It should make it a lot cooler inside the boat and allow me to leave the hatches cracked open at night so the boat will actually cool down!

I did some measurements and came up with something close to a 10’x10′ square.  That’s a LOT of fabric and was looking to be almost $200 in just fabric if I bought the heavy duty marine grade outdoor canvas for it.  I’m cheap, so I didn’t want to do that.  We kept the old genoa sail because we couldn’t get any money for it (it’s pretty shot…) so I decided I might as well cut that up and use the fabric for my own devious purposes.  If it only lasts a few seasons I can at least tweak my design and decide later if I want to buy real fabric.

Fun fact about sails: NONE of those seams, angles, or lines are square.  We were outside in the sun for way longer than anticipated trying to make an actual square shape for this thing. People don’t like to use old sails for this because the fabric is very stiff and thick.  Which…they’re right about.  However, the final product folded into a reasonable square about double the size of a standard blue tarp of the same dimensions.  I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

My sewing machine is NOT happy about having to sew like 15 layers of heavy Dacron… but she did it like a champ anyway! I added some webbing loops to the corners and centers to give me something to tie lines to.  There are only 3 per side, but I can add more later if I think I need to.

I only ran out of thread on the bobbin twice, which I consider a success!  I also finally got to use the zigzag stitch setting on my machine.  It matches the other stitches and looks pretty cool. 😉

The final product folded up nice and small and the white color should be fairly unoffensive looking on the boat! I’ve definitely seen some ugly colors that people have done, even if we ignore the ugly blue tarps some people insist on using. ::barf::

The shade fit the boat pretty well.  I originally had the dimensions tapering from 10′ to 9′ on the end and I should have stuck with that since the front is a little too wide.  I may modify it eventually so it will fit better. I like that the white fabric still lets light in through the windows and it seems to block enough sun to stay cool.  Not sure how wide I can leave the hatches open before rain will get in. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with it!

So there ya go! I finally finished a project I started!  I have a nice, useful shade tarp that was (essentially, minus the cost of the sewing machine and new sails…) free! 😉