You can go at it just about anyway you want. I've seen quite a few approaches, from peeling like a banana to, what looked like an elementary schools scissor attack. As an experiment last season I just made a slit up the back, peeled it off and rolled it up. I was able to reuse it this season with just a bit of shrink tape closing the slit. Wasn't exactly pretty, but it worked fine through the record setting winter we had up here. I'm not sure if I'd do that again, but I wanted to see how it would hold up. Good luck. We splashed ours last week. First sailboat in the marina.