Spyke

Syndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.

View original on lemmy.world

3 replies

It's a yum-cha knockoff one from Amazon. The purported brand is "Unigear" but any others that look like it are probably just the same. It's all of $30. It is definitely not ultralight, nor is it constructed with much panache or care. It is apparently authoritatively waterproof, though, and it didn't disintegrate in the wind, either. That's all I asked of it, really.

I do have an ultralight(ish) diamond tarp, but I wanted to try out a hexagon one for the better coverage, and I decided that discretion was the better part of valor vis-a-vis spending a bunch of money on it. It's easily four times the weight and triple the bulk of my lightweight tarp and the fabric is honestly much thicker than it needs to be, but it offers superior coverage for not just you but also all of your junk. I'm packing it on my motorcycle anyway, so it's not like I needed to carry it on my back myself. You can see I have both panniers under there as well as my gear and helmet. I arrived at camp in a pouring down thunderstorm and it rained steadily all night, so the extra sheltered area was much appreciated. I didn't even bother to attempt setting up my tent.

The guyline toggles it came with are also pure bollocks. So much so, in fact, that I invented my own to replace them with. Notably it also does not include enough line to tie out all eight attachment points. It only came with six guylines, which is either enough to tie it out to two trees or stake down the six remaining tieouts, but not both at the same time. Luckily the included lines were also about four times longer than they actually need to be, so I cut all but two of them in half to distribute among the various tieout points and was then able to leave about 40% of the remainder at home.

At some point in the future I'll surely dish out for a nicer lighter weight option. If anyone has any recommendations there, I'm all ears.

2

If you’re gonna spend money on a dyneema tarp, then I wholeheartedly suggest you go with dutchwaregear.com! One of those cottage shop deals operated by pretty much one guy I think. I have one of his hammocks and it is my favorite purchase of all my camping gear. He has a bunch of interesting tie-out hardware he has invented. Aluminum and titanium.

1

You reached the end