G'day guys, Ben from Snowys here and today we're going to be talking
about one of our most affordable hiking tents in our range, the Companion Pro
Hiker 2, here in front of me. This is a fantastic tent, super popular among Scout
groups, school groups, you name it, this tent holds up here in Australia.
It's 2.7 kilograms. Now for two people, that's pretty good, alright? The fly has a
3,000 ml waterhead rating, whereas the floor has a 4,000 ml waterhead rating,
so when it comes to being waterproof, this tent here does the job. The poles
are made from an 8.5mm aluminum - alloy, all right? So
that's incredibly strong. So you pull it out of the box, comes here and it's
stuff sack, really cool. You've got your compression straps here
to keep it nice and tight. So in your bag you get your fly, all right? That's the
green bit, you get your tent inner (the grey bit), your pole bag and your pegs,
pretty straightforward. You'll also get a gear net, now you don't always need this
but we'll show you how to use that in a moment. So the first thing you want to do,
you just want to lay your tent inner out. So once you've pegged in your four
corners through the rope, you've got two sets of poles and all you need to do, do
one at a time, connect these up, just make sure they get in the slots here. So you
come around the far side here, you've got these sleeves, really simple, you just
feed it through the sleeve. The other great thing about this tent is that,
right here in the middle, there's no joining, all right? So this pole will just
feed straight through. From here, what we want to do, we're going to drop it in the
eyelet in one corner, we're going to come around to the other corner here and
we're just going to start to push that up, alright? Make sure the tent doesn't
get caught there. Drop it in the other eyelet. Now the benefit with this
tent is that if it's during the middle of summer, you're sure it's not going to
rain, there you go you've got a tent ready to go. But if you're a little bit
concerned about the rain, then we bring the fly in. You can see that you got
doors on either side, so you can't really get this one mixed up. You want to look
for the branding, that branding shows you basically where your doors are, all right?
And so here we go, we're just gonna drag this over the top. One of the
beauties of the hike tent is that because it's so small,
getting that fly on is pretty straightforward. From here,
you got your fly again, so we're gonna just pull these poles out, drop them
through the eyelet of the fly, drop them through the eyelet of the inner and
there we go. And we'll just do this for each corner again, all right? And what
we're going to do now is going to tie out the vestibules. Unless it's really
strong conditions, you just want to be pegging down the side that you're not
going to use at the door. We'll go this side. And the last thing left we've got
to do, you should have 2 pegs left and these are for your guy ropes here at the
end, all right? Just pull these out, basically these guy ropes are super
important in giving the tent stability, especially in the wind.
In they go. Alrighty, so let's talk a little bit about the features here of the
Pro Hiker 2. At the front here and on the back side you've got this vestibule. Now
this vestibule's fantastic so that you can store your gear if you need be. Whether
it be your hiking pack, your shoes, your esky, whatever it is, they can fit in
here before jumping into the inner of the tent. The other great thing is that
you can roll this vestibule back. Now doing it like this is super handy
because you can still keep your gear here under cover on this side, but the
beauty of the Pro Hiker Two is that you can actually open it right up. So you
just take it out of the peg there, all right? And then you can roll this side
back as well and what this gives you now is a beautifully exposed tent so that
you can get all that fresh air in, that sunshine in, whatever it is that you're
after, we can make it happen. We're going to jump in the tent and then
we're going to show you a few extra little features from inside the tent
that you might be interested in. Alrighty, so you've jumped in the tent for the
first time, you've unzipped your mess, now the great thing here is this mesh will
all meet at this point here, alright? And then you can bunch it up like this and
there's a nice little pocket here on the inside that you can just tuck that into,
gets it out of the way. The other thing you shouldn't forget is your stuff sack,
alright? You don't want to lose that because that's super important for when
you pack it down, all right? So this also can get put in its own little stuff sack
here in the corner. And then you've got your gear mesh, alright? We're going to
stack this up here inside in just a moment, alright? So if
you want to come in, have a look and I'll show you how to do this and a
few other little features here inside the tent. As you can see, it's pretty
spacious. We've got about a 117 cm of height here
with plenty of width to get two people in with their
gear on the outside. I'm up here on my knees touching my head on the roof but
it's pretty good for a hiking tent. Now we've got our gear loft here, alright?
That's pretty straightforward, all you just do is basically attach that here
into the points of the tent, now the beauty of this gear loft is it gives you
the opportunity to store stuff like your phone, your keys, whatever you might need
to keep it, you know keep close and handy during the night and stuff that
you don't want on the outside. The other great thing about the tent here are
these ventilation points, alright? So you've got these ventilation points that you
can open up from the outside, right in behind me, one here in front of me, as
well, obviously is the other door here okay which allows you then to be able to
ventilate through the outside by opening the fly there. The other thing that's so
great about having two doors is that because it's a two-person tent, that
gives each person a door each. It also gives them storage space for their own
gear, so you don't have to be climbing over each other during the night to get
out to go for a whiz or anything like that, you've got your own space, your own
side, makes it really practical. Alrighty, guys so that's pretty much it, in terms
of the tent. So now it's time to pack it down, so make sure you grab your stuff
sack out of the tent, grab your peg bag, then what we're going
to start doing, making sure everything's undone and zipped up again.
So we take the pegs out, take the guy ropes out and then we go back to every
corner and we start undoing those corners again. Now because we're packing
down this time and we know we are bringing it straight down, you can just
take the poles straight out.
Once that's done,
the fly comes straight off and then we're just going to start pulling these
poles out one, just gently like that, just until you lower the tent and then
they should slide just straight out like that.
Now, I find the easiest way to fold it up is basically to fold the fly and the inner
all together. You may need to keep that fly separate if it's been a bit wet
overnight or there's a bit of moisture on the fly, you might want to look to try
and dry that out obviously as much as you can before then wrapping it up in
with the inner.
So make sure you get your final pegs out here.
The way that I do, it's pretty simple, we're just going to fold it into thirds and then we're going
to roll it up from there.
Now before you get to this last bit, grab your pegs and your poles so you can
keep them all together...
stuff them in...
back into the bag, you get your roll top closure. Roll that shut.
Bring your compression straps in together .
So there you have it, the Pro Hiker's back in its
bag, ready to go into your rucksack. Now if you've got any questions you can jump
online or give us a call and we'd love to help. And don't forget that we're
happy to deliver right across Australia for free.
Until next time, thanks for watching.
I'll see you soon.