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Showerthought: my tent pole splintered on night 2 at Shasta and the duct tape fix took me 3 hours
So last month I dragged my old 4 person Coleman up to Lake Siskiyou near Mount Shasta for a 3 night trip and on the second evening one of the fiberglass poles just shredded at the ferrule while I was putting the rain fly back on after a wind gust. I figured whatever, I keep a roll of duct tape in the truck, this is a 10 minute fix. Nope. The splinters kept poking through the tape every time I bent the pole, so I ended up wrapping it, bending it, hearing a crunch, unwrapping it, and starting over about 5 times. Then I tried sliding a chopped up aluminum tent stake section over the break as a splint, which actually held way better than the tape did, but cutting that stake with a dull multi tool took forever and I nicked my thumb doing it. Total time from snap to a pole that would actually hold shape: close to 3 hours, most of it in the dark with a headlamp that kept sliding down my forehead. What finally worked was the stake splint plus 4 tight wraps of tape on each end, and honestly the tent stood fine the rest of the trip. My takeaway is that duct tape alone is a bad field repair for broken poles and I should've packed a proper repair sleeve from the start. Anyone got a favorite pole splint trick, or do you all just carry a spare pole set?
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