Dinghy chaps repairs

We hauled the dinghy home to the hangar to do some repairs.  It has a very small leak that needs to be addressed - and it can't be done hanging on the back of the boat. 

So, I am taking this opportunity to finally sew on the nice registration placard we bought when we were back in Texas.

This is a photo of the dinghy when we first bought the boat.   It has the previous owner's registration numbers showing thru a cut-out in the dinghy chaps.

And this was my solution to temporarily display our NC registration numbers - done with black electrical tape! Don't look closely - I "free-handed" those characters.... Ugly but legal.

But now that I have the dinghy chaps removed, it is time to fix it properly!

So I just measured the "hole".....

And cut out patches of sunbrella material to cover the holes on each side.

 Top stitched the borders - the placard is a very heavy plastic coated canvas.   My machine sews it easily.

Patches ready - I sewed the placards on with black UV resistant thread so you can't really see that.

And now the "hole" is covered and we're going to be all legal once I attach my NC Wildlife registration sticker.  Note that I did several other repair patches (like the one on the bottom left).  The dinghy gets some serious abuse up against docks!  (That's one of the purposes of the chaps - to protect the dinghy from protruding "stuff" on docks!)