Boat Supplies - Water Purifiers are Essential!

Think you’ve got everything for your boat? Are you sure? You’ve got rope, safety vests, emergency flares – but what about a water purifier? You can’t drink seawater or the water from most freshwater lakes and rivers. If you plan a long boating trip, where you are replenishing your drinking water from different land sources, you want to be sure that water is safe to drink. You need some sort of water purifier.

What’s The Fuss?

You can survive on average three months without food. But without water, the average person will die in a mere three days. That’s an extreme example, granted. But in many water sources there may be microscopic bacteria and pathogens that can make you sick with vomiting and diarrhea. Being dehydrated and disoriented on a boating trip is not only no fun, it’s downright dangerous for everyone on the boat and everyone else boating in your path. Avoid it by getting two kinds of water purifiers, one for freshwater and one for salt water.

Salt Water Purifiers

• Boiling: The old water purifier standby system. This requires a little do-it-yourself skill. You fill one kettle with salt water. You connect two kettles with copper tubing and boil the water. The salt stays in the first kettle and the cleaned water gets trapped in the steam, and then drips through the copper tube into the empty kettle. It takes a while, and you do need a fire source.

• Desalination Systems: This basically does the above with much larger quantities of water at a much faster pace. They can cost a few hundred dollars. They are available through boating equipment stores.

• Osmotic Pressure: These are also available at boating supply stores, and sometimes Army surplus or sporting goods stores. There is a portable kit type available for around $100. This usually looks more like a freeze dried meal than a water purifier, but it has a good reputation. The dirty water is pushed through a membrane filter (with itty-bitty holes) and sometimes cleansed again in chemical solutions to make clean drinkable water. A similar kind of water purifier is called reverse osmosis.

Brackish And Fresh Water Purifiers

Unlike most salt water purifiers, brackish and fresh water purifiers are a lot lighter, and cheaper. They are not powerful enough to remove all the salt from seawater. They can be found in camping stores, sporting goods shops, boating supply stores and their online equivalents.


• Ceramic Filters: Better at filtering brackish water than ocean water (much less salt), these have only been around for a few years and are getting easier to find, although you might have a bit of search in front of you. Suppliers are most easily found online. These water purifiers are portable, so they only filter a few cups of water at a time.

• Tablets: These are the old Army and Navy standby. They are cheap and portable. They also don’t make the water taste like water – it tastes more like you are drinking out of someone’s swimming pool. In emergency situations, though, the water will help you get to safety.

• UV Light Pen: One of the newest is a small battery operated ultra violet penlight that purifies water in seconds with the means of ultra violet (UV) light. These are run on batteries. Some run on lithium batteries, and some run on solar power charged batteries. These are the most high tech in the world of portable water purifiers. And they look really cool; like a streamlined phaser from Star Trek.

To Sum Up

Whichever water purification system you choose for your boat, look to see that it has a rating of “.2 microns”, which means only .2 microns (read = teeny-weeny) can get through. To be doubly sure of safe water, you could boil it for ten minutes before purifying it, if you have the capacity to boil water on your boat :-)