One of the tents I purchased in 2023 is the Tentsile Flite. I thought it looked pretty cool and it seemed like something that would be fun to camp in, so I searched for a good price on it and purchased one. I set it up a couple times in my yard and slept in it once before taking it out into the Croatan. I have lots of things to say about this tree tent, or double hammock. Sadly, it is mostly critical.
The Flite is comfortable to sleep in, even if you’re not a hammock person. It has room for 2 people or 1 person with some extra space for gear. It also has lots of places to hang things inside. That’s about all I can say about it that is positive.
It is heavy (about 11 pounds/5 kg), it takes longer to set up than any other shelter I own and you cannot put up the rain fly first, so, if you’re setting up in even a light drizzle, you’re going to have a wet hammock before you can add the rain fly. When I have to set up my more traditional hammock in the rain, I put up the rain fly first, then I hang the hammock underneath. The hammock never has to get wet, at all.
I cannot over emphasize that the Flite takes a long time to set up, and it’s not trivial. You also need nearly ideal placement of three trees for support. I selected our campsite for the night of February 9 specifically because it had three trees that were the right distance apart and arranged in a near perfect isosceles triangle.
My next, serious critique … I’m leaving out the minor stuff … is that the tent is beautiful and open until you put on the rain fly. The rain fly wraps the entire tent so you have almost no view from inside and it’s even more difficult to get in and out. The tent itself is really well constructed, but the rain fly feels like a sloppy afterthought, in it’s design and how it is secured.
And finally, I haven’t yet figured out how to stay warm in the Flite. It has a place to insert an insulated pad, but a normal sleeping pad won’t fit the tapered shape of the sleeping area in the Flite, and a rectangular under-quilt also doesn’t work. I put a fleece blanket and my insulated shirt in the sleeve where the pad would go and I’m sure that helped, but I could feel the cold underneath me all night and the temperature was pretty mild (about 45F/8C).
Otherwise, the camping trip was uneventful. We didn’t get rained on or invaded by coyotes. I didn’t hear any bears and even the owls were pretty quiet. We were in no hurry to break camp on Saturday morning. It was around 11:30 when we got all of our gear back to the car so we stopped to make something to eat before we went for a hike up Holsten Creek on the other side of HW58.
