When you need to fill your water tanks, but there is nowhere for you to pull your yacht into to fill your water tanks, you will be forced to shuttle water out to your boat in jerry cans. The most common size of jerry cans is 5 gallons, and these cans are big!
When you are shuttling the water back and forth, a large 5 gallon jug is just what you need! Since you have big water tanks, you will find yourself making a bunch of trips back and forth from your water source to your yacht. All of a sudden, you wish the cans were bigger so you could make fewer trips. This is your thought until you go to lift a full water can. At 5 gallons, you are forced to lift close to 40 pounds. If you had a 10 gallon jug, you would need to lift 80 pounds! Since you can't go bigger, you simply have to go more.
If you carry 100 gallons of water, you could make:
- 20 trips with 1 five gallon can
- 10 trips with 2 five gallon cans
- 4 trips with 5 five gallon cans
All of a sudden, more cans sounds like a great idea! If you can fill a bunch of cans in your dinghy, you won't have to make many trips back and forth from shore to get your water tanks filled.
This train of thought will carry on as you get to the store to pick up a bunch of water cans. Then you see how big these cans are and find yourself wondering: "Where will I store these?" If you leave the cans on the deck, they will get eaten up by the sun. If you try to store them in a locker, you will have no space left in your lockers!
Here is the dilemma: Do I make a bunch of trips with a few cans or do I make a few trips and then need to store the jugs around the boat? If only there were an easier way!
A friend recommended I try collapsible water tanks since they still hold the standard 5 gallons but they fold up flat. Since they fold flat, they can be stowed inside the cabin where UV degradation is not a concern.
Since these fold up and stow so small, I got 6! We carry 160 gallons of water, so these 6 will allow us to fill our water tanks in only 5.3 trips to shore. This will let us keep our tanks filled while not having to worry about where to store the tanks or having to make a ton of trips back and forth to shore.
