Again it looked fine so I decided to take it out for a trip. It held great and I was confident I did it this time until once again it was losing air. This time the leak had found its way out on the top side of the
original patch job. WTH! I thought about
this for a little while then realized where
my mistake was. This was not because of
a poor patch job or the D-Ring I was
using. The issue was that I did NOT
deflate the tube before applying the
patch.
Now before you start tell me how
stupid could you be, remember this was
my first time patch up a leak in a tube. I
was over confident in the ease of
patching a leak on a hybrid float tube. We
all learn from mistakes and I now know
what I did wrong. After realizing this I did
fix it by deflating it and adding glue all
around the edges of the D-Ring Patch. It
looks bad but it is holding just fine now. I
am writing this to let you know that these
are easy tubes to fix but you still have to do specific things to make sure they seal right. I will go through the basics steps of repairing a hybrid float tube in the next article found on page 23 of this E-Zine Issue.
By: J. Bernier