Hello, its been a long time since I've posted but I'm hoping someone can offer some advice! Does anyone have any tips about taking down a Wolf Lake in strong winds, if you haven't the option to sit it out till the winds drop?
We recently had a broken pole due to dong this. I was wondering whether it might have been better not to remove the zipped in groundsheet. I really like this tent and its stood up well to some strong winds but taking it down (and I would imagine setting it up!) was a different story, not easy for 2 of us to do.
I don't have a wolf lake but we do have a sunvalley 6 which is almost identical to the wolflake in design. In windy conditions speed is of the esscence.
Contrary to how i normally take down my tent, when it is windy i leave all the guys pegged out and remove the side poles. Obviously this unstables the tent but that is why leaving the guys attached is so important. After that it is a case of 2 people going from the fromt holding the front pole and very quickly remove the front guys and any pegs at the pole base then walk the first pole back to the second pole. repeat this all the way back along the tent until you get to the last pole where you can just drop the whole tent flat back on itself effectively collapsing the back guy ropes. from there it is easy to remove the poles and fold up the tent. If you find that your gorilla arms don't stretch far enough to remove the side guys whilst still holding the poles erect then it is worth taking the time to indavidually move every guy into reaching distnce before taking the tent down. Or get a third person to remove guy ropes as you go. Never an option for me.
As to whether removing the groundsheet is better or worse i can't comment as the sunvalley is sewn in, but i can imagine that leaving it attached would give the tent more weight, anchoring it to the ground more and preventing the wind from getting underneath and creating a sail.
Hope this helps,
Claud
Interesting, I had to take the sunncamp eden (identical to sunvalley8) down quickly the other day in a strong wind. I took out the side poles first. Then loosened the guylines, and quickly unpinned all the poles so they were all lying flat on the flysheet.
removed poles, then guylines and finally the flysheet pegs.
Taking pegs from one side , and folding it over before removing the pegs on the other side, with me and son lying lengthways on top of flysheet while hubby removed the last of the pegs.
we unpeg all but front and back guys (we also unzip the groundsheet) then we just unpeg either end and let it's weight drop it down, the extract the poles. use the weight to your advantage!
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Topic: Taking down Wolf Lake in windy conditions
