Tent Trauma(s)

As mentioned previously, Friday evening at the Santos Fat Tire Fest had an intense storm that resulted in a wet tent interior.  I'd more or less shrugged and mentally planned on a new tent – it's 25 years old after all, and I'd just Nikwaxed it a couple of years ago and had only used it once in the meantime, and here it was leaking again.  Then two things happened.

First up, while taking the tent down, I noticed a trash line on the outside of the fly.  A little closer examination (see inset) and it appeared that the source of the wet tent was rising rather than falling water.

Even so, I was still open to buying a new tent.  Twenty five years is a good run for any piece of camping gear.  Straight-up replacement, incoming!  Then I went looking for a shiny new Eureka Apex 2XT or something comparable and... wait, Eureka's gone?  Whisky Tango?  I mean, they're one of those great companies that... No, gone, just gone.  More on this in a minute.

So I set the tent up in the back yard and hit it with a hose, and you know what?  Pretty damn watertight.  Oh, I've got the older straight-zipper rainfly model, that zipper's always leaked a little, but it's clear that the water problem wasn't the tent's fault, it's where I pitched it (and that astonishing deluge).  The tent was already up and wetted down for testing, so I just gave it another coating of Nikwax and called it a day.

Now back to the demise of Eureka Tents.  Reading between the lines on what happened, it seems that their 2023 Q3 revenues were way down compared to Q3 2022, and so as an underperforming division of Johnson Outdoor products, it had to go.  Never mind that everybody and his brother had taken up car camping during the covid-19 scare and that of course sales of durable items like tents would be down for a few years after a big boost like what happened in 2020-2022, and that this whole cycle was completely foreseeable and could have been ridden out.  Nope, burn down Yet Another great brand, move on.  For what it's worth, the same thing is happening all over the bike industry as well, and I'm sure it's happening with many other "pandemic safe" outdoor equipment manufacturers as well.  Freekin' bean counters.  For a fairly gentle take on what was going on inside Johnson Outdoors, read this short article about Eureka's demise.

Now, as for the rest of Johnson Outdoor's lines, Wikipedia has the complete brand roll; that makes for a handy no-buy list.  I just have no patience for bean counters anymore.

Anyway, I've still got several good tents – a 9x9 funhouse, the 2XT discussed here, and a dinky 1-man Spitfire, and no good reason now to replace any of them.  Good, because I just had to replace a water heater and my mountain bike shoes.  Things were stacking up a little around here.

Damp Camp