thanx guys- Joey, if you lived on the shore you know how cold it getsw.(and you guys up north as well)!!!those of you who live in florida dont have this problem and if it never got below 50° i wouldnt bother with the covers either. But it gets pretty damn cold here sometimes in the winter and the fish are still snappin!!!! i gave it a trial yesterday and I am pretty happy with it. the snaps instaed of a zipper to get in and out of work great and you only open what you need and its easy to pop them open to make quick work of grabbing a rod when its singing. The zipper on the aft end allows someone to lean in if they are standing outside in the cockpit,they can suck up a good amount of heat also. And the heater was actually running me out. I ended up turning it off and on low it was keeping me so warm. What I dont like about it is that it is somewhat harder to work around when doing the fish dance in the cockpit than it is without covers there but i think it is a tradeoff i will take this time of the year,lol.
We did have a running joke going that if it was real cold from our legs down would still be frozen but our torsos would be hot.
-and a fish report-we did catch a few rockfish in the 10-15 lb range but nothing specktacular.