An accidental suspension improvement.

**Beast 71** · 06-16-2017, 11:16

Last week, my cousin Vinnie and I, went paddle camping in the Sylvania Wilderness, in the U.P. of Michigan. It was a hot trip and I it would allow me to use my fractional under quilt (UQ). My UQ is a Jacks-R-Better Mount Washington 3 convertible (now discontinued), which has a removable section to shorten the quilt into a fractional UQ for warmer weather camping. It's been years since I've taken it apart, because I usually camp in the spring and fall and I've found it necessary to use the UQ in it's entirety for warmth. Since it'd been so long since I've used it, I'd forgotten that it's supposed to go from your shoulder to knees and I left the head end suspension alone and having the UQ up that high caused the bottom half of my but to be uncovered and cold. So, i got up in the middle of the night and I reattached the foot end part of my UQ leaving the shock cord suspension on the shorter UQ intact. The two sets of suspension, one at the end and the other a little less than 1/4 of the way up the UQ, held the UQ over the foot box on my WBBB all night (an UQ slipping off of the foot-box of a WBBB is a common problem). I thought wow and wondered if having the same set up at the head end would solve the UQ slipping off of my left shoulder (another common UQ problem in the WBBB), so i put in two more lines, on the opposite sides of the UQ about 1/4 from the end of the UQ, again leaving the suspension on the end intact. It worked like a charm! I did not have to adjust my UQ again during any night of the trip. The 8 lines of suspension and the geometry involved really held the UQ snug and didn't even interfere with the shelf on the WBBB and even though there are more lines running up the sides of the UQ to the ends of the hammock, they don't get in the way of getting in and out of a hammock. Although it specifically solved the problems of using a UQ with a WBBB, I'm certain that my new method would be beneficial, to increase snugness, on any UQ/hammock combination. Has anyone used this method before ? I haven't seen it, but it seems so simple that I'd be surprised if it isn't in use already. I'll try to post a diagram of it later to let you all have a clearer idea of what I did, because the photo I took doesn't show it really well.