If you have an Eastbay and cruise with small children, you may wish to have a permanent door on the helmdeck area. You also may want to close off the area for other reasons, but whatever the reason, this does not seem to be an option on that boat. When an owner approached us about fabricating one, you can guess we were on board with that. We originally did a mock-up from foam from a sister ship (Eastbay 43) here at the yard since the boat was located across the bay. Good idea except as one with a background in boat production, I figured that these boats would not be identical and they weren’t. It took a lot of tweaking to get the door to fit properly. The layup is layers of foam sandwiched with fiberglass resin to create the face and sides. The door is essentially hollow and we fabricated a thin panel for the inside of the door. To be more cost effective, we opted to paint this door instead of applying gelcoat. At first glance, the color is a bit off but with time the paint will end up blending just fine. We originally planned to have a custom recessed door latch made for this but due to time constraints we had to drop back to the good old cabin door hook to fasten it. When the customer has the boat back in the marina, we may retrofit but as in most cases, there is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution. We also added a locking door stop to latch the door back when open and a door jam to stop the door in the right place. All hardware was stainless to match the rest of the helm area.