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by koolba 17 days ago
That’s incredible.

What does one eat and drink on a trip like this? The article talks about her cooking. With a fire or one of those little butane stoves?

Can a small canoe carry enough water for a trip like this or do you rely on rain water too?

4 comments

She posted a video of her food loadout on instagram. It looked like a lot of dehydrated meals, and also a lot of peanut butter and tortillas.

Here's a video of a day's food: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZd8V8BtGbH/

She said she has two desalinators - one hand-pump and another electric, plus emergency water bottles to last a few days.

its not small at all. its 21 feet long.

she also has solar panels on it. probably just a lil stove she has somewhere.

Portable desalinators exist.
Solar and pump based options I think
I don't know how to verify it, but I've been told that drinking seawater is acceptable to do and is just enough to keep you alive.

If I were to do it though, I would invest in some water filters which are fairly cheap and can remove a lot of things that you wouldn't want to be drinking.

This is false. Sea water is >3% salt and human kidneys can't produce urine with that much salinity or greater. Since they need more water to extract that much salt, the net effect is dehydration. This rower probably had a desalination machine, or just a big reservoir of fresh water.

(Though there might be some obscure edge case, and if you're about to die of dehydration that a little bit of seawater will buy you a minuscule amount of more time? doubt it)

If you're about to die of dehydration - and have been rehydrating with fresh water - you'll be low on salt too so a bit of seawater should in principle be in the right direction for both and help. In practice I wonder if your digestive tract might object to the salt water too strongly for this to work though.

If you're about to die of dehydration - from sweating - and have not been rehydrating you're already also hypernatremic (too salty) as well so I sort of doubt it would help. Sweat is less salty than your blood so it increases salt concentration.

It depends. Hypernatremia refers specifically to sodium but doesn’t speak to potassium or calcium. You need all three in proper balance for your body. So you can sweat a bunch and still need to take in more salts because the balance is off.
No, you die faster if you drink seawater.

Every account of people stranded at sea that survived points to them getting hydrated through rainwater, or fish/turtle blood that they hunted, or even dirty non salty water enemas.

I recall one article mentioning that there's desalination gear on board (that's what the solar panel is for?)