I take at least one long motorcycle trip with a few friends every year and I am not a fan of sleeping in a tent and every time we do one of these trips we all talk about getting hammocks and getting rid of the tents. After breaking one of my tent poles on the first night I started looking into getting a hammock. After scouring the internet and seeing several reviews from what appeared to be good Hammock related YouTube channels I picked up a ridge outdoor gear pinnacle 360 from amazon. last night I decided to hang it under my porch and sleep in it for the first time. It was cold and rainy and my wife thought i was an idiot but I’m used to that.

I made a set of continuous loops and whoopie slings for the suspension. For the insulation I turned an old mummy bag into a top quilt by cutting the hood and zippers off and sewing it back together. I also made a underquilt from another old sleeping bag and sewing some channels for shock cord into it for suspension. Both of those worked great to keep me warm but I still had other issues.

The issues I had were with the hammock itself. I think.

First was that no matter how i changed things around there was a ridge at the side that made my butt quite a bit lower than my knees when I was sitting up. So for me to have my feet on the ground I had to have it only a few inches above the ground. I have seen lots of YouTube videos of people sitting comfortably in their hammock and putting on their boots or just relaxing. This also made it difficult to get in and out of.

The other issue was that I kept sliding down towards the middle. I had the foot end higher than my head and was sleeping on a diagonal but no matter what I did I kept needing to pull myself back towards the head end.

I was thinking that the sliding may have been caused by the ridge line being to short and making to much sag but today I pulled it out and discovered that it is actually to long. It is an 11ft hammock and completely stretched out it measures at exactly 131”, the 83% rule says The ridge line should be should be about 109” but mine was 113”.

So my question is weather the long ridge line caused either of my issues or is there something else I should be looking at. or do I need to just bite the bullet and order the Blackbird?