Staying warm at night in cold, wet weather

This post was originally tentatively titled "Jersey Sheets." We recently bought a set of jersey sheets to help us stay warm in cold, wet weather. My son was looking for flannel sheets but couldn't find any. So he ended up getting jersey, which is kind of like t-shirt material.

Normal sheets will not keep you warm if they get damp. Jersey sheets and flannel sheets will keep you warm, even when they are damp. Other materials will actually wick the heat away, causing you to chill faster and develop hypothermia. If your only choice is between normal wet sheets and no covering, you are probably better off with no covering.

In severe cold weather, we try to get "home" (to camp) before temps drop too bad. In some cases, this means we try to get home before dark or not too long after.

When it is raining, we try to make sure we all pee before the rains hit. In our experience, being damp in a tent makes us all have more of an urgent need to pee. We try to time our bladder relief such that we aren't getting soaked and aren't waiting until the last minute. Putting it off too long can lead to being forced to leave the tent during a heavy downpour, which is a recipe for getting wetter and staying wetter.

When we were in Port Aransas for a month and a historic storm hit, the fact that being wet makes us need to pee helped keep us alive that night. I got out of the tent to go to the bathroom (they have a 24 hour bathroom on the beach) and we discovered our campsite was now in the midst of a newly formed river.

We moved the tent and my son wrung our blankets out in the pouring ran. After that, we were merely extremely damp and no longer literally awash. After that, we were much more able to stave off hypothermia. Before that, I was seriously concerned we would die that night.

If you are homeless and sleeping outdoors, you need to keep yourself as dry as possible in cold, wet weather. One way to do this is to check the weather frequently -- check the hourly report, more than once a day -- and time your travels to coincide with breaks in the rain as much as possible.