Vango Icarus 600 Tent Review

Our new Vango Icarus 600 6 man tent arrived on Friday. So, as is customary, we had to set it up in the garden over the weekend and sleep in it. We did so on Saturday which, also in customary style, turned out to be a wet and very windy night – Perfect tent testing conditions I suppose, especially as it will be used for summer holidays in the UK.

It was easy enough to set up and didn’t take too long, although one of the webbing straps wasn’t sewn up properly. Really we should send it back because of this, but it’s a lot of hassle so we probably won’t. Erecting the tent is just a case of inserting three poles (which are pretty long), pegging out the corners, extending and pegging out the guy-ropes and then inserting the inner ‘bedrooms’ with little toggles. It went up well and we were soon able to use it.

There may only be three of us, but the idea of getting a six man tent was to give us plenty of room. The interior is divided into two, one area which has an inner lining is the bedrooms, which is further divided into two with a very flimsy piece of canvas. This will be one bedroom for me and Anna, and one for Morgan. As it should house 6 there will also be plenty of room spare for bags and such like and just to make life a little more comfortable. There are little pockets along the edge of each of the bedrooms and a full height series of pockets running down the middle of the inner lining which acts as an organiser for things in the outer area of the tent.

The other (front) half of the tent is a single skinned ‘living area’. At 2.0m in height the living area and bedroom have plenty of standing room which is a luxury but very useful in a family tent and one of the things we specifically looked for when choosing a tent. The living area provides plenty of place for sitting around, eating, relaxing and enjoying the Great British weather. You can also buy an additional canopy which virtually doubles the size of the tent and provides a large porch area. This can be used to store kit as well as extending the living area to allow more room to eat and socialise on those rainy days. We could see this being a useful addition if we start using the tent a lot as it will allow us to store all of our wet, muddy gear outside of the living areas of the tent but out of the wind and rain as well.

Morgan was of course very excited by the prospect of sleeping in the tent, so he stayed in it most of the day before headed off to Dave and Sarahs for dinner and then returned to our tent to sleep for the night. Unfortunately Anna and I didn’t get much sleep on Saturday night – in fact, I don’t think we got any at all due to the noise of the wind and the rain. What made this worse wasn’t the fact that I was supposed to be at a swim session at 9am on the Sunday morning, but the fact that Morgan was sound asleep through the whole ordeal!

The tent survived well though, it was a bit billowy in the wind, but that is to be expected from such a large, family, holiday tent and we do get more severe winds here than most places. Everything remained dry as well so overall it was good. If it can survive a night of wind and rain here then it should be fine for most purposes.

Tags: CampingReviewTent