I've had a Grand Trunk Skeeter Beeter hammock for about 9 years, and have had plenty of happy nights sleeping in it. But in recent years I tend to spend more time in environments where a tent makes more sense than a hammock, so I don't use it that often. One effect of this is that when I am setting up the hammock, I'm pretty much making an educated guess as to what will make for a comfortable hang. When I took it on a month-long section of a bike tour, I eventually got enough of a feel for how to rig it that I could be comfortable every night, but it apparently takes practice to maintain this skill. I use the 30-degree angle rule of thumb as a guide, but even with that, I find it very difficult to consistently get a comfortable setup.
When using the hammock now, I more often than not have trouble staying comfortable—I can't lay completely flat, my legs feel constrained, my torso and head/neck feel too propped up. I pretty much have access to one position to lie in; if I feel the need to shift positions, I can't really, except to something unsustainably uncomfortable that I have to move again from pretty shortly. On the ground or on a bed, I tend to shift throughout the night from lying on my back to lying on either side, and in the hammock I can only really lie on my back. I'm 5'9" and around 160 pounds, for what it's worth, so not near the height or weight limitations of standard hammocks as far as I know.
My understanding is that a hammock with a structural ridgeline should solve at least the setup consistency issue by allowing me to calibrate its tension and have that stay in place whenever I hang it in the future. I'm also aware from having researched hammocks a bunch 8-9 years ago that there are hammocks with asymmetrical designs, footboxes, and the like to make for more comfortable sleeping. In the case of the ridgeline, adding one to my current hammock would be quite a process since it would require me cutting through and then somehow patching up the bug net, and I'm not a DIY guy. It's also a basic hammock design; nothing fancy or asymmetrical about it. The nice thing is that it can be very simply flipped over to go from lounging mode (bug net on the bottom) to camping mode (bug net on top)...and it was the cheapest option with a bug net when I was broke back in 2010.
Basically, what I'm wondering is whether I would be likely to benefit from a fancier hammock like a Warbonnet Blackbird, and whether my understanding of structural ridgelines as a set it/forget it mechanism is correct. Or whether, given my tendency to move often from side to back sleeping, I'm just meant to be a ground sleeper. My tent is certainly a lot quicker to set up than the hammock + tarp + underquilt—but while I'm comfortable enough on an inflatable sleeping pad, it doesn't come close in comfort to the nights in the hammock when I've been lucky/practiced enough to get the setup just right. So should I retire the Grand Trunk to loafing duty and replace it with something better for camping in the woods, or just accept that that's about as good as I'm going to do in a hammock?
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