Collecting Water

I will admit that maybe I read too many survival books. In my desire to be prepared, I have a serious amount of useless information for here in paradise. This became apparent when I offered suggestions for water collection today and Eddie said, “We do not need to know how to signal to aircraft with our bodies or make an Australian poncho raft or have the need to use the word survival as mnemonic device”.

We came to Rogue’s Bay with a few gallons of drinking water, so we had time to create our water collection system. We can also fill up our jugs back at Brewer’s Bay, if necessary. I wanted to do several different types of water collecting because in addition to drinking water, I wanted to create a freshwater shower.

We are fortunate that it does rain often here, so the freshwater should be plentiful. The first water collection we made was for our drinking water with a tarp and four large sticks. All the sticks are even and it looks like a table top until we put several rocks on it to create a channel for the rainwater to run off into buckets and jugs. This system means that you should be present when it rains, to change the buckets. We have both learned how to predict rain by the type of clouds. They are very dark grey and can be high or low in the sky, but they are gathered very close together.

Once the water is collected, it needs to be filtered and purified. First we filter it several times to get the debris out. Then it purifies the water by boiling it for at least 10 minutes. This is time consuming to do and is difficult because you cannot put the boiling water into a plastic jug. We chose the alternative, which is a purifying treatment machine, which we brought with us. The purifier adds three ingredients necessary in all civilized purifying processes: iodine, chlorine and potassium permanganate.

We keep this water in the shade, since we don’t have a refrigerator or ice cubes.