I am sure many of you have dodgers on your boats. I am looking for some advice and personal experience.
My boat has original windshield on top of which currently there is a kind of a soft dodger. I am planning to have the dodger replaced, preferably with a hard dodger. I was thinking of keeping the windshield - for once it is part of original looks and design, which I want to maintain. It is also excellent at keeping water out - the boat is center cockpit and waves routinely come right over to the cockpit, so windshield gets a lot of use. It is pretty watertight - even in pretty bad seas I don't get any leaks through it (partially because I don't spare 5200 to seal the seams
).
In any case, the pro that is going to do the work thinks it would be difficult to properly connect the new hard dodger to the existing windshield (and I somewhat agree). So, I am thinking about the option of getting rid of the windshield and installing a relatively traditional dodger - it would have hard top, but the front and sides are zip-on panels, the usual.
So now my question - how watertight are these? Would I get any water through the zippers or through the connection on the bottom of the panels or anywhere else, if the front was being hit by waves?
This is pretty important - I have a kind of a "pilothouse" design where right behind the windshield there is a chart table with instruments, and it is not waterproof at all.
So, what's your dodger experience?