Blacks' Octane 2 two man tent
Weight 2.3kg. Pack size 47x15cm. £149.99
It was raining and dark when I put up the Octane, but all looked hopeful. There were clear instructions and two colour-coded tent poles. But things soon went wrong. The poles are pushed through narrow sheaths in the outer tent. Pushing the first pole, the fabric ripped. Then the poles kept coming apart. Finally, 20 minutes and much swearing later, I had the flysheet up... inside out. Start again. Finally, flysheet up correctly, I crawled inside to hook on the inner. Once up, it's a comfortable tent with a large-ish porch, semi-flyscreen door and OK headroom at the front. There's good air circulation - important when dealing with smelly walkers. Putting it down was even more difficult - extracting poles from their sheaths was like trying to push uncooked spaghetti through without it breaking.
Length 220cm (plus 90cm for porch), width 140cm tapering to 95cm, height 100cm tapering to 90cm.
Reviewed on 25/03/2007 by Paul Miles