Skin Hole Repair: Compliments of the Zig Zag Stitch and a Friend

There comes a time when low tide is a relative high tide. While the rain’s pitter-patter is my current soundcape, it’s a reminder of the snow’s absence. I’ve skinned, toured, shuffled, hiked to snow (once), a handful of times this season: all of it blissful. And all of it, or at least most of it, on a 2” base. I swear, when my friend Barry and I sneakered to the top of our local yo-yo spot, we found firm-surface hop turns and not one rock. 

But truth be told, rocks and thin coverage were the overriding theme. We just had to avoid them. (And yes, the pitter-patter of rain, as I type, now sounds like a downpour.) On that acoustic note, I’m coming clean: I skinned right over a slightly snow-covered rock on my third outing. I was on a pair of decade-old skimo planks, a hand-me-down from my older child. You see, at the time, I thought, he’s 10, why not score him a light setup (skimo skis)? Someday they will be mine. And now they are. But skimo skins are somewhat thin, which also makes them light. They are fast, too. 

They are also somewhat lacking in durability. So the measly rock I must have hit tore a hole in the skin, which, unsurprisingly, created some drag as the ski-skin tag created some undue friction.

Lucky for me, my friend Barry is handy with the sewing machine. A day later, I headed over for a fix. I thought I was being clever: I brought a 2.5mm-thick piece of flexible PVC from a raft repair kit. I imagined we’d glue (with some sort of epoxy) the PVC patch to the skin’s glue side, and call it good. That raft patch material is tough stuff. 

Barry had a better idea. He lobbied to take a small section of 40D nylon and sew it on the skin’s glue side. He used a zig-zag stitch. And all the zigging and zagging seems to have done the job for now. I’ll report back. 

I’m also aiming to learn about some of the fixes folks have used to repair a skin tear that leaves a hole once the tag is scissored off.