My hammock setup

After 2193.1 miles of walking and ~150 hammock nights, maybe my setup isn’t terrible. I found it to be comfortable, warm, and serviceable with features I liked.

If you want to know more, I suggest you start here. although I advocate buying off something like “thriftbooks”… certainly your favorite local seller can get the book for you.

definition: larkshead: aka cowhitch. See this article on wikipedia. Easy, fast, strong. If you have a loop, you can make larksheads to hold onto a larger pole/tree/something by passing the tag through the loop.

Materials used:

• Started with basic, no-frills ripstop nylon hammock with no suspension
• Made my own suspension (details to follow) out of zing-it and amsteel lines plus some attachment gadgets.
• Fronkey style bugnet
• Dyneema tarp (this is where my money was, and it was totally worth it)
• Closed cell foam pad and down overquilt (money also here and worth it) finish out most of the rest of my setup

Key features:

• It was light, easy to setup, and durable (enough)
• Once the tarp is up, I can do most other things without getting any wetter. At least once had a few folks make dinner under just my tarp as it was dry when the world was wet.
• Since I made the suspension, I could fix things on the fly / make-stuff-up-in-a-pinch

Specific parts:

• Dream Hammock “Freebird” gathered end hammock without any frills with HyperD fabric. THIS IS YOUR VERY BASIC HAMMOCK. It looks like they no longer sell it in the form when I bought it (not even continuous loops on it). It is more expensive but then again, inflation is happening.
• Spider Web 1.5 Straps and Huggers Whoopie Hooks from Dutchware Gear
• 2.2mm “Zing it” throw line for ridge lines (NOT suspension) and tarp tie-downs. This amazing dyneema line comes out of the arborist world where they use it for throw lines when they are trying to get a rope over a limb for rigging. It’s super light, and relatively hard to tangle.
• 7/64 amsteel (here it is at dutchware but you can get it many places) for whoopie slings, continuous loops, basically anything that carries serious load.

Setup:

• Find 2 trees approximately 6 big fourlo steps apart. Your mileage may vary. I can’t help with you finding the distance for your suspension. They should have nothing tall between them and you should be able to reach pretty high on both trees to level points. The further apart, the higher you have to reach.

• I have a stand-alone tarp ridgeline made from zing it. Mine is set up where one end has a dutchware gear fleaz hook at the first-attached-end (go around the tree and self-hook to the main line. In the “middle” there is a prusik knot with another dutchgear fleaz on it. The prusik knot provides the “length adjustment”. The other end goes around the second tree and is terminated with a small loop (spliced in). That loop goes into the fleaz hook on the prusik knot and you move the knot up or down the ridgeline to tighten. Adjust until level and tight about as high as you can reach. Getting this level makes everything else easier.
• My tarp has 2 fleaz that “pinch” the ridgeline and hold on the tarp, one on each of the 2 far corners of the rectangle tarp giving the longest length possible for tarp on the ridgeline. They are attached onto a small continuous loop that I larkshead onto the tarp cinch points. To mount my tarp on the ridgeline, I just hook one fleaz on one end of the ridgeline, walk to the other end, hook the other. Bob’s your uncle.
• I have zing-it tarp tie-downs that go to mini-groundhog stakes. I use dutchware fleaz on very small continuous loops on the stakes, and my tie-down lines are long “dog bone” lines (8′ of zing-it with a spliced loop on each end). The tie-down line stays on the tarp. The fleaz are on the stakes. I roll the lines up in the mornings. They don’t tangle because they don’t have hardware on the long-line part.
• Once a few stakes are in, I have a space no longer getting wetter to do the rest.

Here’s a full and detailed view of one half of my suspension. It is basically a tree strap attached to a whoopie sling. I have one of this combination for both ends of my hammock.

The tree strap has a loop at either end. One end is larkshead’ed to the whoopie sling’s stationary loop end.

To mount the suspension to the tree, I basically larkshead the suspension to the tree. Imagine if the pencil was a tree trunk, I’d loop the suspension around the tree thusly:

… and keep pulling it through until the loop in the treestrap closes on the tree. The truth of it is I might make 2 wraps around a smaller tree before going through the loop… after about 10 times setting up you’ll know what to do. It’s hard to explain but isn’t hard to figure out.

Here is the Dutchware gear whoopie hook. Works great. Doesn’t rust. 😀

Here’s the part of the whoopie sling where the line runs through the choke point. 150+/- setups later, it shows a little wear, but honestly it’s in serviceable condition for it’s use.

Hopping to the hammock, it has a lot going on at the gathers. Here is one gather end. I added the pencil for scale. As this takes all the stress in exactly the same point every time, it shows some stress on where the continuous loop is grabbed by the whoopie hook. After 2000 miles not bad wear.

To see it all, I needed to peel back the bug netting to see all the details.

The big red gather line is 7/64″ amsteel line and is where a continuous loop is larkshead connected to the gather of the hammock. The yellow line is the hammock’s ridge line. It’s a zing it dog-bone (a line with a 3″ +/- loop spliced into the end. You can see the splice in this image) which is larkshead connected outboard of the hammock gather on the outside of the amsteel continuous loop.

The bug net just pulls past the gather and hooks into the red loop.

Note: once set up I have a carbiner I used to hook my (nearly empty) pack onto the red loop. It serves 2 purposes: 1- (duh) it keeps my pack covered from the elements, and 2- If water tried to walk down the line (and onto my hammock!) it would instead follow down the carbiner to my pack (which won’t make me cold and wet at night). The amsteel is plenty strong. It does change the hang of the hammock slightly depending on how heavy my pack is.

Enough side chat; let’s finish getting my hammock hung!

My hammock is stored/carried in a 2-ended stuff sack, the yellow end is my “foot” end, and the red loop is my “head” end. Here you can see the light carbiner I use to hold my pack onto the suspension once it’s all set up.

With my tree straps firmly in place on both ends, I take my hammock to one end. hook the continuous loop into the whoopie hook, then allow it to unpack as I walk to the other tree, pick up the dropped hook, and hook the other loop. While keeping the hammock off the ground, I tighten approximately 1/2 the slack up using the whoopie sling in hand. Keeping the hammock off the ground, I walk back to the first end and take up the remaining slack.

At this point you’re mostly done!

Here’s a fairly common condition:

socks and pants hanging to dry out. My feet could be a little to the left to level out, but I was probably trying to elevate my feet to help them recover faster. (yep, move 12 inches toward the center means you get elevated feet)…

My advice, learn to splice the dyneema and make your whoopie slings. There are many vids out there on yt to help you. In the end, this worked great for me. When I needed to “go to ground” (4 time total) I at least had a CCF pad. Some folks prefer under-quilts and suffering on those few days.