4 season tent for kayaking

[FettsWay]

Need a 4 or 3.5 season tent to take kayaking. Needs to be light weight, at least under 10 pounds and pack small.

Will take recommendations for 2 and 4 person tents, and price is a concern, so if you can vouch for a cheaper brand, let me know.

Also, I just bought a nice warm weather tent with rain fly:

http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/t...parentType=index&indexId=cat602107&hasJS=true


Would this work in cold weather if I simply had a warm sleeping bag?

 

[Snagger]

If you're considering one of those, then also consider the Quecha 2 Second tents. You'd need a warm sleeping bag in winter, just like with the your linked tent, but they pack very small, are incredibly light and erect in the two seconds claimed - the longest part of setting them up is pegging the corners and guy lines if your expecting windy conditions. Putting them away takes about 30 seconds. That must be a big bonus when kayaking - you want something quick and simple so that you can get changed and dry quickly and something that doesn't take much time or energy away from the kayaking or relaxing at the end of the day. I got them because spending an hour erecting a big tent each night and another hour packing it away in the morning became a real chore and started to become a dreaded task each day, starting to spoil the trip I was on.

I have two of these tents (a 2 man and a 3 man). I only used them in summer, but we had very heavy rain and gusts from thunderstorms and they were fine - the only criticism being that rain can enter when the door flaps are open as they have no "porch". They're cheap, too.

 

[Jonathan Hanson]

I'm going to be frank here, and say that any time I see the words "4-season tent" and "cheap" in the same sentence, I cringe.

If you're planning to paddle when you might experience hostile weather, your tent is going to be your last refuge. You can get by with a cheap sleeping bag in a good tent, but the best bag is worthless if your tent comes apart in a blow.

I led sea kayaking trips for years, and I spent more time than I can remember patching up cheap tents brought by clients. One little 25-knot Norther and poles would break, flies would rip, zippers blow. I've seen "waterproof" fly material I could breathe through.

The tent you linked doesn't look too bad; at least it has DAC poles. The full-coverage fly should help in bad weather, but it will still suck wind through those big screen panels.

If you're on a budget, I still think Sierra Designs offers good value for the money, as does Mountain Hardwear. But investing in a really high-quality tent will pay for itself in security and longetivity. Hilleberg, Bibler (Black Diamond), etc. - buy one of those and you'll never worry about bad weather again.

 

[Christophe Noel]

You might look at MSR's Skinny Two tent. It's a very simple dual hoop tent in a single wall construction. One thing I noticed from my sea kayaking days, water and wind are common bed fellows. I love hoop tents for their ability to survive ugly blows. Hoop tents were common on all major high altitude climbs for decades. The key is to have bomber stake out points. Some people squawk at that point, but even a $1000 freestanding tent will need equally bomber stake out points in a hard blow or it will instantly implode. At least with a hoop tent, if a stake point fails, your tent falls down and doesn't shoot broken pole bits through tent walls.

For a long time, I used a Mountain Hardwear Mountain Wing 2 hoop tent as it only needed two stake points. A fully loaded kayak often served as one point. Sometimes a buried paddle was the other.

That particular MSR tent would easily handle four season duty. Great little tent at a really nice price.