They may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but fixed windscreens do help keep the cockpit dry while providing good forward visibility.
Some yachts, such as Najads and Hallberg-Rassys, provide windscreens as standard and have been designed accordingly with faceted coamings at the front of the cockpit. Others retain curved coamings and provide specially- constructed windscreens to fit. And of course many also have canvas sprayhoods attached to provide even more protection from the elements.
My Moody 38CC Jigsaw doesn’t have a fixed windscreen, and as I’ve seen some clunky DIY retrofitted ones I didn’t particularly want to go down that route.
But when our sprayhood cover came up for renewal I gave some thought as to whether a partially-fixed sprayhood would provide much the same advantage as a windscreen but at much less effort and cost.
In fact, it proved very straightforward to modify the existing sprayhood frame by simply shifting the support rods from the back to the front hoops.
A couple of sprayhood cover makers I approached were reluctant to tackle the unusual requirement, but we soon found one that would (at no extra cost over the replacement sprayhood, I might add) and the result has proved most satisfactory.
In ‘normal’ mode it looks and functions like a standard sprayhood. It then takes but a minute to release the rear straps and rearmost poppers and fold the rearward part forward onto the fixed ‘windscreen’.
We also have a zipped window in the centre section to allow the breeze through when it’s hot!
Since we needed a new sprayhood anyway, this modification didn’t cost anything extra.

Unreefed

Reefed