| I was overjoyed when this tent hit the showroom. My daughter was now backpacking and I deperately needed a three person backpacking tent. What a find! Three people and 2.3kg? Whoohhooo! I bought it and the next weekend we headed off to the mountains for a trial run.
It rained the entire weekend. It varied from drizzling to pouring, but I can't recall it stopping once until we reached the car on Sunday. Yup, then the sun came out.
The first thing I found when pitching the SL3 in the rain, was that it was very tough to erect the fly and then build the tent underneath. I had been doing this with my MSR Hubba Hubba, and really missed that with the SL3.
Next, I went to load our gear inside and found the real design flaw with this tent. Thanks to the small vestibule, I had to have both the vesibule door and tent door open at the same time. As the door on the fly came up much higher than the door on the tent, it was raining right into the tent. Getting three people's gear inside meant that I had let in quite a significant amount of water too. Bummer.
Over the weekend, every time someone went in or out, the rain came in. We had real trouble keeping our sleeping gear dry.
During the night, I slept on the outer position, and we put my daughter in the middle. This allowed us to store gear at her feet, which was necessary thanks to the tiny vestibule. No cooking in that vestibule! Anyway, I'm not a giant (6') but during the night I easily pushed my feet out past the edge of the fly at the back of the tent, soaking the foot of my bag.
The sloping walls made for very tight getting-dressed-sessions in the morning.
We returned the tent and bought the Mutha Hubba. I have long been an obsessive gram counter, but the extra 700g of the MH are well worth the extra weight in my pack. We're much more comfortable, and more importantly (to me!) we're staying dry. If I want to get wet, I'll leave the tent at home, thanks.
|