I finished my DIY Skeena kit a few months ago, and just got back from a 4-day trip on the Escalante. The river was running low and I scraped the bottom and sides against plenty of rocks, but fabric still looks in fine shape. Before the trip I converted it into a self-bailer and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. I cut down an old Thermarest to use as the inflatable floor insert (I think it was Bruce who recommended that in the forum). I think I’m going to make a new seat and shorten the baffles by an inch or two so I don’t sit quite so high, but other than that it worked exactly like I hoped it would. The top portion of my seat was leaking pretty quickly. I got tired of regularly blowing it back up and decided to just leave it deflated.
I used pieces of extra seam strip fabric to iron on the name (“the Flying Hellfish”). I had a friend of mine who’s a talented artist draw in the jaws and eyes with a sharpie, and I used seam grip mixed with white or black ceramic pigment to paint his design. The red part above the lower jaw is supposed to be the tongue, but it didn’t turn out quite how I wanted it to. I’m going to use more black seam grip to modify the shape of it a bit. It seems very durable, to answer a question posed elsewhere in the forum.