Beware the Broken Rope
When installed correctly and used properly a hammock is as safe as just about any device whose use separates the user from Mother Earth. Airplanes can crash. Parachutes can fail. Bicycles and skateboards can flip. And once in a while a hammock falls to earth bearing its hapless user with it. These crashes can be merely unsettling, and damaging to one’s repose, or they can cause serious injury.
Let me tell a story about myself that happened in 1970. I had just returned from traveling in Mexico with a Mayan hammock I had purchased there. This was the first time I had ever seen such a thing, and both my friends and myself were a bit dubious about the idea of a web of string being strong enough to hold a person up. But I set it up and found it surprisingly comfortable. In the afternoons after work in the vineyards I enjoyed hanging out under the pear trees from which it was suspended until one day when my reveries were rudely interrupted by a snapping sound and a hefty spinal jarring. My first thought was that I had been right all along about this string hammock. Then I noticed that it was the rope I tied the hammock to the tree with that had broken, not the hammock itself. Then I felt ashamed of myself. After four years on Navy ships I had used clothes line to tie up a hammock. Clothesline? When you hang out your wash on the line do you hang yourself out with it? Of course not.
· The first rule, therefore, in hanging your hammock is to use strong rope. This could include mountaineering rope which is very strong for its gauge or 1/4 inch three ply polypropylene rope. Always make sure that the rope is tested to two or three times the rating and weight load of the hammock. When you set the hammock up, of course, you will be using two ropes which will double your load rating. This is a good thing because when you use bends and hitches (what the landlubber calls knots) you decrease the load bearing capabilities of the rope by 20%.
· The second rule is to check the rope frequently throughout the season. Even a strong rope is weakened by rats gnawing on it, squirrels chewing on it, cats scratching on it and so forth.
· The third rule is to replace the rope each spring when you set the hammock out again. The strength of most ropes is decreased by 20% to 40% by the action of UV radiation over the course of the season. After a season or two outside your ropes may be ready to dump you, and maybe your friends along with you. So dump the rope before that happens
Better to dump than be dumped I say. Happy hanging!
