Best appreciated from within a cozy cabin tent. Rain has been coming down steady and hard. So much for “showers”. Hope to get out out with my fishing rods in the Hornbeck tomorrow…
Gotta appreciate the outdoors!
-sing
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looks like you are getting flooded out!
A bit damp eh.
Yes, better than in a ultra-light backing tent.
Enjoy!
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Whether the weather is cold or whether the weather is hot. We weather the weather whatever the weather whether we like it or not.
Seems like there should be something about dry and wet in there somewhere too!
Since getting this Kodiak (and a larger Springbar for me and wife camping) last year, i can more appreciate why some prefer inland waterway tripping with canoes over kayaks. Can haul a lot more luxury along, including a bigger and heavier tent. (Of course, I just drove in to this luxurious lakeside campsite with my hatchback. LOL.)
The rain was on and off last night but the wind
was persistent. A silver lining this morning.
The fishing should be good as the bass should be in aggressive spawning mode.
Life is good outside!
-sing
3 Likes
We hope that outdoor people show up with decent rain gear.
A quality tarp can make the difference on a wet trip between good and no good.
I like a tarp to cook under and for a gathering spot for the crew. Everyone can see out.
They can be used for shade in the heat.
I’m planning to get back to trout fishing this summer. I haven’t done much in 30 years. I probably will need new fly line and then see if my fingers can still tie knots (and that is the big question).
Ruth & I went to a big tent when we bought the Forester 10 years ago. The pop-up camper was worn out & the Subaru wouldn’t pull it. We went for a REI Kingdom 6. Room enough for a queen air bed in one half and two chairs in the other half when the weather is crappy. Of course I still have my selection of small tents including the TarpTent Double Rainbow (2 1/2 lbs) for backpacking. The 2-person Nemo at ~5 - 6 lbs gets more use for canoe and kayak camping.
We are getting spoiled though. We have a (work-in-progress) 12X20 off grid cabin on family property in Northern Michigan. A fine place to be including on a rainy night.
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Could make a difference in getting hypothermia and worse. When I started to get episodic bouts of supra ventricular tachycardia (SVT) due to a mitral valve problem, I started to carry an emergency tarp with my flyfishing kit me whenever I head into remote areas. The SVT would last 30 seconds to several hours, during which I could be lightheaded and physically limited in exertion. In a rain situation, it could be threatening.
Fortunately, I’ve only had to deploy the tarp - a T6Zero (T6Zero Emergency Shelter System – Coalcracker Bushcraft) once while flyfishing a remote mountain stream in Maine.
-sing
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My challenge is being able to see well enough to tie a k ot on the leader. So, I always have a clip on magnifier with me for that. I tie my own flies, from larger streamers to size 22 midges. Now, I only tie (and fish) nymphs (size 16-8) which are bigger and simpler. 
Agree! I used to backpack (and flyfish) weeks at a time all over New England. When we expecting our first child, I knew my backpacking and fishing jaunts were going to be limited. We were fortunate to buy a small off grid camp (16’x24’) in western ME. My whole family spent time together and appreciated the outdoors there. Now my two boys (men) are preoccupied with their own life pursuits and my wife usually goes up to the camp with me around her birthday and maybe another occasion during the year. So while I still enjoy the camp, I find that I want to go back and visit the places that enthralled me to the mountains, streams and rivers. But, I doing it a way that is a bit more indulgent of my aging body.
Vs
Vs
I am thankful for the all the opportunities I have to experience and enjoy the outdoors! 
-sing
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Looks like we are getting a major nor’easter in New England late tonight into Friday. Time to break camp early (while it’s dry), get home, and wait for surf!
Took a walk this morning in the quietness.
Mahalo! Beginning of another camping season.
-sing
5 Likes
There is nothing like waking by the lake with rain falling on your tent. In our case, the paddling had been done. We came close to a record for breaking camp.
Tent leaks – now there’s a topic.
I had the similar but smaller REI Hobitat 4 (I think they replaced that with the Kingdom which they then replaced with the Wonderland) and loved it to death for 10 years. During a 5 day trip camping at Saguenay Fjord in Quebec it would start to pour rain every night around 6 and not let up until dawn and I stayed dry as a bone inside it. Having the space to spread out (it fit a full-sized air bed, folding chair and side table) was such a relief and the spacious near 7’ ceiling was great for stringing laundry. The 2-man backpacking tents I had used in my younger (and more flexible) days would have been torturous to be trapped in for 12 hours a day, not to mention having no room to hang wet gear – “glamping” is WAY MORE than a “luxury.”
I was devastated when all the seam sealing and the coating on the Hobitat fly failed catastrophically during a rainy night at Michigan Qajaq training camp in 2022, saturating me, my sleeping bag and a good bit of my gear. Not just seeping, it was dripping inside. Not that the tent owed me anything, I suppose – I bought it for $100 from a local guy selling it on Craigslist, in apparently like-new shape except that one of the two main crossover pole sets had a permanent bend that gave the tent a tipsy appearance. My brother dubbed it “The Squurt” since it looked like a squashed yurt.
I set it up in the back yard when I got back from that sodden last camp and realized that there was too much fabric failure to salvage it. Every inch of seam tape had delaminated and the fly and floor were peeling like a tropical sunburn. I threw out the fly (after compulsively stripping it of zippers, snap clips and cordage for my stash of repair parts). But decided to keep the poles and tent itself, which, like your Kingdom, has a mostly mesh roof and side walls, to use as a bug-proof screen house in the yard.
I considered the REI Wonderland to replace it but checked it out at our local brick and mortar and didn’t like some bits of it – also feeling a little burnt due to that massive product failure (more on product failures later). I also found during scanning through Ebay and Marketplace for another used Hobitat, that several of those I saw listed mentioned that the tents had leaks or had been repaired for leaks. Not something I wanted to risk again.
So I eventually found a deal on a Sierra Designs Tabernash 6 last summer but have yet to field trial it. It does has the features and space I wanted that were similar to the Hobitat – and I trust Sierra Designs more on quality than I do REI, who farms out manufacture to third party subcontractors, just like L.L. Bean and EMS do. REI used to own MSR (Mountain Safety Research) from 1981 to 2001 and made them in house. They sold MSR to Cascade Designs (makers of the high end Moss tents) in 2001 and it has been random third parties ever since, mostly Asian.
A chemist friend explained to me once (I have lost what he wrote about it) that there are two similarly named vinyl-based compounds of fabric coating material with different properties – one lacks strong adhesion persistence but is cheaper, and may have been what was used in the product failures that I described.
I’ve owned tents continually since 1972 when I got my first one, a funny little flat roofed semi-freestanding Coleman that I got for $30 plus 20 Marlboro cigarette pack coupons that I (a non-smoker) gleaned from the trash in the parking lot of the convenience store I worked at evenings during college. The tobacco companies used to regularly sell discounted outdoor gear if you could send them “proof” you were trashing your health with their products. My little styrofoam 2-man Sea Snark sailboat was obtained in that manner too (for $40 plus another wad of scavenged coupons) and had the “Kool” cigarette logo emblazoned on the lateen sail – my brother (always good at such things: he was an advertising and marketing designer) noted that I could explain that meant “Kerry Out On the Lake”. Had great fun with that for about 10 years before selling it for $75.
Back to tents: Over the decades since that Coleman (and including the REI), I have owned and heavily used tents from Trailwise, Sierra Designs, Cannondale, North Face, Big Agnes and Marmot. I sold higher end backpacking and mountaineering gear at outfitters through most of my 20’s including all those brands plus Gerry, Jansport, Eureka, Stephenson Warmlite and Altra. Probably sold more Eureka tents than all the others combined because they were cheap and highly popular with boy scouts. But, as we learned from having a variety of tents available in our rental stock, and based on customer warranty returns, Eureka, among all the brands was also more short-lived. As with the hapless Hobitat, their coated floors and flies tended to delaminate and leak after 50 uses (5 to 10 years for customers but only couple of seasons for the rental ones that would be out nearly every weekend during the summer.)
I still have a Cannondale I got in 1983 that has intact waterproofing and a 2-man Marmot purchased in 2001 (which I lived in full time at an archaeology field camp for a month the next year) that were good as new last time I aired them out 2 summers ago, in preparation for lending them to friends doing the Pacific Crest Trail. When I sold my North Face geodesic VE24 winter tent (which had been used on a 5 week Himalayan expedition by members of my outdoor club before I bought it from their post-trip garage sale) it was over 20 years old and still functionally intact. I know people who have used their Sierra Designs and North Face tents for decades without leaks.
I’d be interested to know what sort of research has gone into studying the durability of coated fabrics. My observations of what happens to tents, rain gear and some of the materials used in folding kayaks have suggested that coating failures are due to two factors that differentially affect the fabric and the coating. Woven fabrics either absorb or adsorb moisture (adsorb is when the fibers themselves may resist water, like the monofilament of nylon, but the spaces between the fibers attract and hold up water, like the voids in a sponge). Waterproof coatings do not, instead they repel moisture. As a result, the fabric substrate in a coated material, will be microscopically expanding when wet whereas the coating will not, UNLESS is it under some tension so that it slightly stretches, which is the case with a a well-cut snug rainfly. The opposite is true of heat – heat won’t make fabric expand but it can cause coatings to semi-melt and “relax”, which can cause microscopic breaks in its bond with the substrate fabric.
The fact that I have observed that ripstop fabrics, like the heavy gauge ripstop nylon packcloth that Feathercraft used to use in it’s folding kayaks for hatch covers, sea socks, spray decks, duffel bags and their distinctive internal frame boat carrying backpacks, tend to have coating delamination that follows along the rip stop grid lines is another clue that it is relative expansion and contraction of the substrate and coating that eventually causes the massive failure of the waterproofing. My camping and paddling gear that has experienced this over the years (several PakBoat folding kayaks also had this problem) were never exposed to wild temperature swings, being stashed in my basement. But they were in a humid environment – in fact the Feathercraft I still have was effected by mold during storage at one point, on most of the coated ripstop packcloth.
Back to my comments on Asian gear subcontractors:
Some Asian third party manufacturers have been found to knowingly or unknowingly use substandard fabrics in their contracted products – PakBoat had an issue in 2007 with a whole batch of coated inflatable sponsons and seats failing catastrophically within a short warranty period, requiring costly replacements to customers whose puffy parts leaked like a sieve. And I believe one of the inflatable sleeping bag mattress companies had a similar recall issue due to defective Asian-produced bladders. I have wondered if some of the repeated delays that Trak folding kayaks has experienced over their fractious history might have been due to similar offshore quality issues.
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My least appreciated tent was issued during basic training. Each man got a tent half. You had to button them together to have a complete tent. A poncho was the floor.
It rained in the wee hours and it started dripping on my chest. Luckily I had received a care package that day in a shoe box. It sufficed to keep me from getting soaked.
It was very warm at Ft. Bragg in July so getting hypothermia wasn’t an issue.
I got myself out of Dodge. Tomorrow through Friiday is supposed to be real blustery, soaking nor’easter. I set up camp in the rain. I didn’t want to breakdown in a soaker.
Have to admit, waking up is not a problem for me. Sleeping sometimes is. I fell asleep and slept very well to the pitter patter of drops on the canvas tent tarp. 
-sing
Springbar tents are nice! I used to work there and was gifted one of their Euro Traveler tents. I speak highly of them and love how customizable they are. Can be
Yes. Springbar seems like a pretty cool company. I also got a 10x10 Springbar. Pretty spacious tent with a high ceiling and yet easily set up and taken down by one person. Pretty important while doing either in the rain! The “downside” for me is the amount of cargo space it takes up in my Hatchback, especially if I am planning to bring along a lot of fishing and paddling gear. So, I looked into getting a smaller 7x9 Springbar but that model doesn’t have enough door/windows as the 10x10. So, I ended up getting a 9x8 Kodiak (with the same “springbar” desgn) because of the doors and windows on both sides of the tent (for better ventilation). The Kodiak packs smaller and leaves a little more room in my Hatchback for other gear. A more expensive solution is to get a slightly bigger car/toy hauler. That won’t happen for another few years since since my 2006 Honda still has less than 60k in mileage.
-sing