Hello,
My name is Danny Nye and I gave up on tents when I was 12 years old, back in 1978. K mart had hammocks for about 5 bucks. They used machine woven nylon mesh and 2 inch steel rings with spliced poly line, anybody remember those? The first thing we did in our Troop was replace the lines with 1/2 in flat braid parachute line. My tarp, for twenty years, was an army poncho suspended from grommets to the hammock lines with a rolling hitch and a taught line hitch, and the hood left on top and hung over the side. When the weather was good I guyed the corners out to stakes or trees and when it was bad I snapped the edges under me. When the weather was perfect- no tarp.
2 memorable trips come to mind. One was a run of the mill church youth camp out at Kerr Lake reservoir back in '82. I set up normal for rain, bagged my pack and hung it from the tree near to hand and crashed. Sometime during the night it rained, on the lake, upriver on the Eno and on the Flat, very hard. At stand to I looked around to a cool October morning, all nice and toasty and saw a group of 1/2 submerged dome tents and pathetic campers wading around, the ones that gave me so much greif the day before. So I made breakfast and roled over and caught some zs. When I awoke the water was down.
The 2nd killer camp was one winter in the Green Swamp, on the Wacamaw River. We never found the island we were to camp on so we tied our canoes to suitable cypres trees and hung our hammocks. The dodgiest maneuver is to hang your gear and bag from a canoe and climb in and out of the same. Naturally we cooked in the canoes.
My current hammock, for the last 12 years has been 7 feet of volleyball net with 3/8 dacron climbing line with a bowline for attatchment. The tarp is from a brown nylon A frame tent of dubious vintage. Works great, I only had to pay for the stakes and the line as the rest was a gift. I have some fish net that I am going to try and one of those huge army mesh hammocks that will probably hold my wife and I.
Anyhow, Cheers! I have to go to work.
Danny
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