Small boats can be tricky places to store the quantities of water some cruises require. Our family of four consumes at least 3 gallons per day, more in hot weather. Carrying a week’s worth of water in rigid containers would leave precious little room for our bodies and gear in our 18′ sail-and-oar pram. What’s more, hard-sided bottles make poor use of the irregular spaces where water is often best kept in small boats. Rigid containers would be difficult to secure and impossible to fit into the small, curved, awkward spaces available low in our boat where we prefer to keep such dense supplies. The Collapsible Water Bag can be laid down flat, stood upright and, if not filled to the maximum, be stowed in awkward places, conforming to the shape of the space.
James Kealey
Read this article now for Free!
Ready for a second free article? Create a free account by entering your email address and a password below.
— OR —
Subscribe now for $29.99 a year and have immediate access to all of our content, including hundreds of small-boat profiles, gear reviews and techniques, adventure stories, and more! You can also browse our entire archive of back issues starting from September 2014, as well as post unlimited classified ads. This is an extraordinary value!
I have used Platypus poly bags for a number of years now. Though there are several sizes, I like the 2-liter ones. They seem tough, and last several years. I did make the mistake on a Baja kayak trip of using a small one (around a liter, I think) for unleaded gas to fuel a beach camping stove. Why a mistake? Well, it held up through the trip okay, but when I offered to donate the last bit to our driver’s gas tank, it gave up the ghost just as I finished the transfer.
I have used the 2-liter size for carrying wine, and they will hold well over two 0.75 liter bottles. They don’t seem to impart any unwanted tastes to the wine, but maybe my taste buds are not as robust as they could be (I can also sleep with a pea under my mattress).
In addition to fitting into awkward nooks while stowing, they also serve as water ballast. The advantage of water ballast is that in case of a swamping, they have neutral buoyancy, so will not take your vessel to the bottom. Obviously, that means also that they don’t provide quite as much ballast effect as denser object, but to me, they are worth the tradeoff.
Nice review. In my experience the wine (and any after-tastes) seems to ‘neutralise’ after a glass or two … after two bottles well … (not suggesting for a minute you would drink it all at once)
I’ve ordered a few 5-litre bags for my cruising dinghy adventures this summer. I think they will be really useful.
In order to assure that this sort of bag is hygienic between trips, I store them with a bit of cheap vodka in each bag. Seems to do a good job, even over the winter.
I see that you carry North Coast Brewing bottles on your boat. I’m a fan of their “Old Rasputin.”
These bags are rigid enough that they stand open and un-collapsed to dry out. They look convincingly dry after a few days, but I still store them open.
Those bottles were indeed Old Rasputin – a great beer for a cold night on a beach. Around the house when no one is looking we commit the terrible heresy of pouring it over ice cream. It makes about the most delicious desert you could imagine.
– James
I’ve used paper cups with the bottoms cut out to get air into various types of collapsible water bags to dry them out. Upside down and hanging. They keep the bag from collapsing on the spout hole.