This spring I went hammock camping with my son. We were planning to use the dutch double hooks with a spreader bar, but I made the mistake of forgetting the bar at home. In the end we found a pair of trees that were the right distance to hang and one was wide enough we didn't need to borrow or improvise a spreader bar. We just wrapped the straps so that there was one coming off of each side of the wide tree. We had a 12 foot hex tarp (it was supposed to be a 12 foot winter tarp, but there was mixup with my order) that covered us just fine. The winter tarp would have helped to protect our gear a bit better from the rain, but it still worked fine. I personally prefer the side by side setup as it means no one has to climb to get into their tarp and there's no worries of the top hammocker falling on the hammocker below them (either from gear failure or klutziness).
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