Vinyl cover. We don't worry about the sparks/ash. Yeah, it was a little pricey, but I've already seen one posted ahead of me in this thread that we went through in no time and you could only use small pieces of wood in it as well. And like I said, ours sits year round on our dock, over salt water, and it's in as good a shape now as it was the day we bought it. And we use it a lot from September to April. So to me, it was worth the extra $$. Your mileage may very well vary.

:-)
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