R-21EC King Marine Canvas Angler Edition with Full Enclosure

I've received numerous enquiries about our Canvas from King Marine for our 2016 R-21EC. First, the style per King Marine (Dave) is: R-21 Angler Edition with Full Enclosure. We chose or should I say Andrew/Dave chose the Charcoal Tweed material canvas color for us -- and their choice was excellent IMO. The frame has but 4 vertical poles, two roof slightly curved poles over cockpit and another at the transom end along with two short supporting angular struts in the top rear two corners. The top is one piece of material, attaches to the Pilot House rear roof line via an install track. The sides of the top are rolled around and snapped in place to the longitudinal poles held up by the 4 vertical poles. The end result is a very tight roof and it can be tapped with the back of the hand and sounds very taught/tight and somewhat springy. I've found the top can be left in place for short trailering distances without issues. However, for longer trailering distances and especially on freeways or 55 mph primary roads it would be strongly advised to remove the top and stow it. There are a total of 9 zippered panels that are used for the full enclosure. Also included are two gusset strips that are provided to attach/zip the panels adjacent to the Pilot House sides. These could easily be left in place during trailering but as they are really easy to install there's no need for that... just remove them and stow them is my advice. The panel sections above the cockpit railing are (in my case) 40 ga clear vinyl and quite stiff, but not so stiff they cannot be easily rolled in about a 5" diameter so that the whole panel can be rolled and raised to the top roof line and held there in place by two straps that clip to secure the rolled up panel. The lower section of each panel is canvas and aligns with the cockpit railing. Of the 9 panels, all but two can be rolled up. The two transom corner panels cannot be rolled up for obvious reasons IMO. The rear/transom panel that can be rolled up is a very generous size (width-wise) and opens up the whole swim step for easy access and the joys from listening to the water noises as the boat slips through the water... ;) There are two opening flaps in the lower rear side panels to provide access to the stern-most cleats. After the Factory Delivery experience on the water the panels were removed for trailering. My idea was to remove the side and rear set of three panels as one piece. That is each of these sections had three panels and the were left zipped together. Thus only three large panels if you like resulted. Each one was then fold at the zipper lines and folded over to form a single panel. This single panel then was fold one more time such that the width ended up being just shy of 18". Thus stowing these was simplified and the real advantage was that when wanting to install the full enclosure later it would be easy to know where each set of three panels went. Without this you will have 9 panels and figuring out where they all go takes time and is tedious and wastes valuable time IMO. Today in my driveway I took the three zipped folded panels out of the V-berth and installed them on my own for the first time. [u]I timed myself and it took me 54 minutes[/u]. Talking with Dave at King Marine, he was impressed and told me that time should be easily halved after doing the full enclosure install a few more times. He liked my idea of keeping each set of zipped 3 panels together to facilitate easy re-installation. The trick in getting the panels zipped up quickly is to figure out which zips need to be released to lessen the strain elsewhere when zipping things up. Dave indicated that with the first case of rain on the full enclosure there maybe some water leaks at the zipper lines. This will quickly resolve itself and I was not to worry. There must be some sort of self-healing at play here. :lol: I managed to take some photos as I went along and during my 54 minutes. I have placed the photos in my Dropbox and in my Photo Album.