On the 20th May I fly out to Peru for the start of inaugural Jungle Ultra. Part of the equipment we need to carry is a hammock as there are far too many man eating ants, spiders, snakes and bugs on the ground. As the weather has been fantastic over the last few days I thought it would be a good idea to have a go at putting up said hammock!
According to the instructions on my Hennessey Hammock it would only take me 2 minutes to erect – simple! not when your me!
I managed to find two suitable trees in my garden which were well spaced to hang the hammock, with everything still in their packaging I unpacked and laid the hammock out between the trees. Sounding good so far and I was feeling very smug, easy! however that had taken at least a minute, better get a shuffle on.
The next step was to put the tree huggers round the tree with the loops facing the centre of the opposite tree, then you put the rope of the hammock through the loops. Now this is where I got confused. My understanding of the instructions were that I was to then wind the hammock rope around the tree several times and drop it down between the loops of the tree huggers, then secure it. However, this somehow didn’t look right (5 minutes!)
I know lets look on Youtube to find the answer. After about 5 minutes of searching I eventually came across a video that showed me how to tie the hammock up – looked easy enough so back to the garden and proceeded to replicate what I had seen. Ummmm!
Pull the cord through both loops (I did it from the right as thats what he had done on the video, I didn’t want to make matters more complicated for my brain!) pull the cord through so it pulls the hammock off the ground, then keeping a good grip on the rope, put one end under the tight rope, then over and between the loops and pull, creating a figure of 8 (I thought it looked very professional at this stage, now feeling very smug!) this you repeat several times, eventually securing it off. I then repeated the process on the other side only to find that the hammock was still lying on the ground. ooops! This was easy to rectify as all I had to do was undo one end, tighten the hammock and bingo it was ready to go!
Looking good so far, although I was now about 30 minutes into the construction (this is SO a blue job) There are also two ropes on the side of the hammock which you can attach to side trees making everything more secure. I used tent pegs as there were no trees available.
Next step is to get the waterproof cover over the hammock as it will rain at some stage in Peru. This bit was easy even for me. You attach the diagonal corners of the plastic sheet to the hammock then again the side ropes tie onto trees, I put them onto the tent pegs. Hammock construction finished in about 45 minutes!
The most amusing part of the whole process was getting in. firstly I couldn’t find the entrance, eventually discovering it at the bottom of the hammock (silly me makes sense) I undid the velcro and got it. On the positive side the hammock didn’t fall down, on the negative side it was far too low which meant my bottom touched the ground, this caused much laughter from my son who was watching.
Now time to take everything down and attach the skins. These cover the whole of the hammock making packing up much faster and thankfully didn’t take very long – SIMPLES!
Hopefully by the time I get out to the Jungle I will be able to put up my hammock in record time. A good tip I received from someone on FB was to spray the ropes with bug stray to prevent the little critters climbing in with you during the night – I will be doing a lot of spraying as I’m not sharing my hammock with anyone!!
Happy Training
