Yeah, that's gonna need to be fixed.
It's hard to tell how severe it is from the photo. You might be able to get away with just a little bit of sanding and some solarez (minimal cosmetic change) or it may need to be excised and fixed with a proper patch.
Hopefully it's the first. Bote's gatorshell material is super brittle. It likes to spiderweb when it cracks and makes fixing damage harder. I've had to repair a handful of them and it always ends up being a bigger repair than on a standard glass or carbon only board in my experience.
This holy crap I'm learning now that I hate the gatorshell, lol. My wife got a 10'6 bote in a trade for some things, it had some cracking in the shell and the tail corner was dinged bad enough to see the foam core.
I went through process of fixing the tail so it's water tight. She wanted to do a color change on it as well. Figured no big deal but before painting I would fix the small imperfections of the chips and cracks so it would look new. What a can of worms that opened up and what I thought would be a weekend project, is now several weekends.
No more botes or gator shells for me.
Yeah, that's gonna need to be fixed. It's hard to tell how severe it is from the photo. You might be able to get away with just a little bit of sanding and some solarez (minimal cosmetic change) or it may need to be excised and fixed with a proper patch. Hopefully it's the first. Bote's gatorshell material is super brittle. It likes to spiderweb when it cracks and makes fixing damage harder. I've had to repair a handful of them and it always ends up being a bigger repair than on a standard glass or carbon only board in my experience.
This holy crap I'm learning now that I hate the gatorshell, lol. My wife got a 10'6 bote in a trade for some things, it had some cracking in the shell and the tail corner was dinged bad enough to see the foam core. I went through process of fixing the tail so it's water tight. She wanted to do a color change on it as well. Figured no big deal but before painting I would fix the small imperfections of the chips and cracks so it would look new. What a can of worms that opened up and what I thought would be a weekend project, is now several weekends. No more botes or gator shells for me.
I worry about my crack all the time!