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Hello all

Am off camping in Cornwall Bank Holiday Weekend (soooo excited), always used to camp as a child and now have decided that I want to go back to my childhood !!

Anyway have managed to get a decathlon Tarp and myself and hubby tried to put it up this afternoon but just ended up rowing, how do you get these b****y things up without everything ending up in a tangled mess of poles, tarp and guy lines, Please help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have our own collection of tarp, poles, guys and anchors and have learned by trial and error to devise arrangements for each of our tents. Basically you need to remember that poles need to be under tension in 3 different directions(mimimum)  to keep them in place. This means you often have to put it up in a rough approximation and then do some adjustments.

For the standard dining shelter shape, start by putting the pole in the hole in the middle of the tarp edge; you will need guyropes already attached at the corners. Loop two free guyropes over the tip of the pole and one of you needs to roughly peg these out (in the direction away from the bulk of the tarp i.e. away from the space that you intend to be under shelter) whilst the other holds the pole up. Then guy out the two corner guys. As long as these 4 guyropes are pulling in different directions the pole the should stay roughly upright whilst you then do a similar operation at the other edge.

When pegging out the guys there are some basic rules to remember. Your guy ropes need to meet the floor at an angle of 45 wherever possible, and the peg holding it needs to go in at right angles to the guy for maximum stability. You also need to think about what your structure would look like from above (i.e. what direction each guy is pulling outwards in) and ensure that the guyropes right round it are pulling evenly in the different directions all round, in order to stop it going skewed. Being able to understand things in 3 dimesniosn come with a bit of practice, but I am not sure I am describing it very well!

For pegging a tarp, which will really pick the wind up, you need something like delta ground anchors too, rather than the bog standard wire tent pegs. We use a mix of deltas and 9" angle iron pegs.