Greetings from Trinidad & Tobago

[occam]

Greetings to everyone on warm & sunny day in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Here in Trinidad there are few homes that don't have a hammock. Everyone has a hammock.
They hang on verandahs, in back yards, under mango trees... everywhere.
They are our childhood swing. I have fond memories of fighting with my brother and sister for my turn.
There are hooks in strategic positions around the house. I can even hang in the kitchen. In fact everywhere except the bedrooms.

I work as a tour guide and photographer and although I specialise in birding tours, I regularly take visitors camping. We use hammocks. No tents!
Traditionally, our hammocks are heavy; made of strong, beautiful, but heavy materials. This year I've been trying to lighten the load.
Some of the places we go camping involve a boat ride. When the sea kicks up we often have to land quite a distance from our camp site and hike through some rough terrain in the rain forest. So as age takes its toll I'm lightening the load! We have moved to light silnylon hammocks!

The next mission is to move to silnylon tarps. We have hundreds of material shops here. Everyone sews! Needless to say no one has heard of ripstop or silnylon. They look at me as if I have two heads! I recently discovered Ripstop be the roll. Fantastic company! Getting things to Trinidad can often be a challenge. A friend of mine was going to Miami. I gave her some money. She ordered my silnylon for the Winter12 kit. Justin at Ripstop expidited the order, it arrived the next day, in lots of time for her return flight. Thank you Justin!

This is a long story to explain how I ended up at this forum. I now have all the ingredients to make my winter tarp. Yippee!
I want to do the cat curves. Ripstop has a link to Xtrekker's cat-curve generator which took me to this site.

For those of you wondering why I need a winter tarp in the tropics.... so I can close the ends when it rains. Our rain can be so heavy we call it "bucket a drop". I'm really excited about making my own tarp. Admittedly once I've worked out the best gear for our scenario I might go the easy route and buy ready made gear from the mighty “amazon” to use for our visitors, but I wanted to make my own

Finding information online for hammock camping in the tropics has been almost impossible. Lots of information for temperate and freezing cold conditions! I'm open to any advice anyone has as to how to make the camping experience better for our visitors. I'm sure you all have a lot more experience of this than I do. I'm still experimenting with different configurations of bug net.

We are into our rainy season at the moment so the camping trips have slowed down and I have a few months to get the gear sorted and the list refined before the dry season starts in January which is when my next camping booking arrives. I've attached a few photos so you can see what we get up to here. I hope I got the attchment window thing right. 1. My hammock on our last camp a couple of weeks ago. You can see my heavy plastic tarp, soon to be replaced! 2. A Leatherback Turtle hatchling on its journey to the sea. 3. The view of the sunset from my hammock. Hammock hanging at GT.jpgLeatherback hatchlings at GT.jpgSunset at GT.jpg

Phew! After writing all that I'm feeling a little tired now. I think I'll go hang for a bit... in the back yard with the dogs this time. If the rain comes I think Ill hang in the kitchen

Happy hanging everyone Ally (Occam)