After watching ‘All is Lost’ while sailing, we discussed the do’s and don’ts of survival at length and decided to try and catch rainwater while sailing from Cabo to Punta Mita. We have sailed in countries where we absolutely needed water, but here, we were just over two weeks from our last fill, so we weren’t desperate but at least another week from refilling our water bladder of 50 gallons (and that’s an improvement over what our 47-foot sailboat came with!). Plus, we start off with 7 Jerry jugs of potable water, so we won’t be filling our only Jerry jug at the last moment as Robert Redford did, unless our 7 Jerry jugs were all dry and we need the compromised water in the bladder.

We have attached a hose to a hole in canvas to catch rain of a canvas surface but this time we used our solar panels that could angle down to one point into a 11” by 16” bin and into a 5-gallon bucket. The two panels we used were 26” by 58” so a nice surface to catch from. I also have my ‘cruise ship’ chair that I use for comfort in our strictly racing cockpit and I noticed it dripping from the netting on the seat, so I set up a large mixing bowl below that and again catch a fair amount of rain. The picture shows the cruise ship chair set up. Just from these three areas, we ended up catching over 5 gallons of water which even impressed us!
Back in the ‘90s we did use a pressure cooker to boil up saltwater then caught the steam off a copper coil into a container. It was faster than a solar still and uses propane, but it has a purpose inside the boat when we might not have sun.
So, we were excited to have our 5 gallons of salvaged water to show it could be done!