Follow Up

The other day I wrote about building a Turtle Dog Hammock Stand because my air bed keeps leaking, and I promised to report on how it all worked out my first night of sleeping in it.

Well, I misread the instructions of a post I thought was the best, but it didn’t work out at all. I tried it out in the afternoon and it held up, but when I got in it that night it collapsed. Fortunately none of the parts landed on me. Since it was around midnight I simply picked up my pillow, went into the bedroom (the stand is out in the huge living room), pumped up the bed and slept there.

Yesterday, Monday, I looked at more photos from different sites, figured out what I’d done wrong, dismantled what I’d done, lowered the hinges and refastened everything. Now the stand is solid and doesn’t move around when I get in the hammock.

So, how did it work out? Mixed review. I normally sleep either on my stomach or on my left side. You can’t sleep on your stomach in a Yucatan-style hammock. Doesn’t work. It’s not real easy to even sleep on your side in it. But I finally got settled in but it took a long time to finally actually fall asleep. The strings aren’t very comfortable on bare skin. But when I did finally drop off things went fairly well. Naturally, being an old fart I had to get up sometime in the middle of the night, and when I’d finished that chore it took a little bit of time to get readjusted to the hammock but I fell asleep faster than the initial attempt.

The positive side is, while I usually am wide awake around 5 a.m., which is the normal get up time for Panamanians it seems, this morning I didn’t wake up until 7:15. Don’t know if that will continue. I didn’t seem to shift around in my sleep like I normally seem to do in a regular bed. Perhaps it’s because sleeping in a hammock you’re not lying on something non-yielding so you need to move around to free yourself up.

That was only the first night. We’ll see how things go. One of the reasons I’m trying to do this is I don’t want to spend the money on a new mattress. I want to save that money for things I will need on whatever boat I’ll be moving on to when I return to the States.