Tears in the rain.

Travels, Travails and Troubles with my shite-hawk

Recently I was searching around for a new tent for our longer term car/holiday camping and I did all the usual things such as trawling around the Go Outdoors website, walking around one of their huge, hangar like showrooms but decided that there was nothing that caught my eye. So then I went for a cruise around Ebay and saw the one tent that I had lusted over during our regular road trip camps to the south Biscay coast and our usual site behind the dunes there. The way that Ebay seems to work now is that as soon as you click onto something it alerts the seller and tells them to make you an offer you can’t refuse : right now,for example I have offers on several display cabinets for the workshop. Anyway…..we’ve got a new tent and it’s the canvas tent. made by the Dutch company De Waard and this evening (as I write) we totally failed to get it up which is a first for me (it’s never happened to me !) as I can usually work out how any tent goes together but not this time.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the names of one brand of Dutch canvas tents, common seabirds, and both their proper Dutch names and their common use names in sailor-speak, my new Dutch canvas tent is properly a Zilvermieuw which in English translates to Herring Gull – which is usually known by it’s sailor speak colloquialism of shite hawke

Straight outta Compton Park

After two hours of fighting with heavy canvas and trying to interpret the seller’s diagram of how the poles went together and where they went in the structure we packed up, rolled up the canvas and it’s heavy PVC groundsheet and gave up for the night. Just as well that we’d chosen to make our first attempt at getting it up near to home and not on a campsite at the opposite end of the country. My partner was beginning to say how complex and heavy it was : I have to agree on the volume it takes up in the car and how heavy it is although I disagree with it being complex as iv’e seen one go up in a scant few minutes one time. The Dutch, in my opinion, always seemed straightforward and logical people who generally like things that are simple, functional and very effective so I figured that there must be a simple pattern and a simple sequence to follow in….yes…..getting it up

Later that evening I spent another two hours watching Youtube videos about Dutch canvas tents : I think I saw one video of our actual example although that was just a seller’s show and tell and not an explanation of how you go from a rolled up heap of stiff canvas to something that can be lived in : for that I had to go to an instructional video about the sequence to follow – all in Dutch of course !.

Getting it up : our second attempt…….(Ok i’ll stop using that line now)

Long term problems and solutions.

We both have our health problems : Jackie is having a tough time with PMR and my series of minor strokes wasn’t a good look. This morning then we were both suffering the after effects of lifting big old carry bags of heavy canvas and poles, that means that this attempt at being independent, in terms of camping for our holidays, is always likely to be a car based affair rather than travelling with a rucksack apiece and a large holdall between us : we did several of our NZ travels in that manner and it meant that we could easily jump on any bus or train with enough energy to stow our kit or get it to wherever we chose to make camp. We have both said that we’re glad we did everything that we did do when we were young and fit as nowadays that’s all long gone.

We need a long term solution just for storing and transporting that kind of weight and not struggling with it at home or on site. Equally a problem is that we need to be more comfortable when we’re at camp which means having more space to live and sleep in and space to cook in under shelter. Back in the days when we did long road trips to France we slept in a modern Tentipi but spent most our time under the shelter of a huge rain and sun tarp during the day : that was where I first came across the large Dutch canvas tents where one half could be living and cooking space all sheltered from heavy rain or fierce sun and as I earlier ,their Dutch owners seemed to cope with them capably,

This tent has more pegs than a 1970’s Yosemite crack line !

My main thought now is to do what I did alongside a co worker with whom I used to teach bushcraft, open canoeing and outdoors first aid : all or any of that needing a veritable mountain of equipment and often the stores for a camp. What we worked towards was setting up the universal base kit in a trailer and stowing that complete rather than it having to be packed and unpacked four times for every course or camp that we ran. With one of our standard camps we’re pretty maxed out with what we carry in Jackie’s car so the new tent is going to be a problem anyway : our solution, I think, is to search around for a small domestic/camping trailer and keep all of our kit in that and essentially only unpack it when we set up camp – and when we do camp to get that trailer to almost exactly where the tent needs to go – no point in carrying it a long way.

Although a long term solution that’s only really short term in the overall picture of our lives as car campers ; as iv’e said before all of the backpacking and bushcrafting through big mountain ranges is long gone. The ability to car camp should see us sorted for the next few years – at least I hope so – but somewhere on our horizon will be the inevitable point where our age and health problems tips the balance against us ; what then ?.

My answer is to put the whole rig on wheels with something like a teardrop trailer which aren’t common in the UK but which many American campers absolutely love : many build their own and there are entire websites devoted to designs and construction. As for me I would build one using a boat trailer as it’s base and boatbuilding technology and materials to build the cabin – a mate of mine says just to build the trailer although that needs the ability to bend box section steel or to be a decent welder – the rest of it I can do as it’s basically building a boat on wheels but one that doesn’t have to float. For your entertainment today iv’e embedded on of maker Xyla Foxlin’s videos : she’s well known as an amateur builder of rockets and at the moment she’s building a full on biplane.

Our erection failure – take two.

So I spent another night on the internet watching what I can only describe as canvas tent porn ; except that it was all in Dutch. I think I came away from that with an idea of everything that we tried to do that was wrong (the tent has a gazebo like top frame) and secondly what I came away with was a whole new level of lust for a different tent design made by yet another of the Dutch tent makers (Karsten). Anyway, armed with new knowledge we went back to Compton park on a windy-ish day and had yet another erection failure : this time though it was the sail area of heavy canvas in the wind (about 20mph) that defeated us. I have to admit that it was my failure once more as Compton park is not only exposed to the south west but I chose an area right in the acceleration zone of that site – the site is clearly on a hill and obviously has even higher air flow at the edge I chose.

That was that, as the saying goes. I had a wildly optimistic idea that I would go back with it the next day as Jax was meeting a friend at the cafe there, only it rained and it was windy Cornish rain as well (Cornish rain goes sideways) so I gave up on that idea and instead turned my attention to winning a secondhand trailer (Ebay again). What we were left with was a final option of taking the tent on holiday with us except this time I chose as sheltered a spot as possible and we took a ‘reserve’ tent with us that I knew I could get an erection with……sorry. Everything had to come together : we had to drive to and find the seller of the trailer and that meant me having yet another fight with my partner’s car navigation which I guess is GPS based except it doesn’t act like my old sailing GPS receivers. Then we would have to navigate our way cross country to the camp site and then have another attempt at yes…..getting it up for real.

The eventual erection.

In the end we managed to get it up but then we absolutely had to because we were away in wildest Dorset and the Zilvermieuw was going to be our home for the next week. It actually went up that time quite sweetly but when we moved site it had to come down wet which isn’t a great idea with a canvas tent that is already heavy and then I made a fundamental mistake when we came to put it back up at a different site. At the end of the week the windy weather turned to heavy rain and strong wind so it came down partially wet and now it’s draped over our fence while I work out what to do with it next.

Overall it’s been a hugely frustrating week, not because of my erection failure but with the Lloyds bank : today for example I found that the reason our camping booking wasn’t confirmed is because the bank blocked my card payment yet again – it happened when I tried to buy the tent and has happened three times since then. Today iv’e been on the phone for nearly two hours being passed from department to department and having to give the same details every time : you would think that doing that all once, including a pass code, would be enough but no. The first time it happened recently I finally got through to an ‘agent’ who found it perfectly acceptable to ask me what I was spending MY money from MY account with as though it was any of her business : do banks now treat us as spendthrift children ?

If anything a week of intended camping out of a trailer and in our big new canvas tent didn’t work out except that it was a great space to live in although the rest of the logistics almost defeated us and it’s mainly convinced me that an essential project has to be to build a teardrop trailer if we have any hope of long term independence as campers. In the short term I think I need to take a step back with tents and find something with the effective living space but not as much weight.

*Compton Park is our nearest campsite and we’ve borrowed a pitch several times to mess about with new tents.