>>”you shove your face down to the stream and "blow it up" with the water in your mouth. A normal unlubricated condom can hold in excess of 1 gallon of water as long as it is carried carefully. If only air - it can often grow as large as 3-4 feet long before bursting”
>>". . . I first read about carrying water in a condom (supported in a bandanna) in Cody Lundin's "98.6 [degrees] The Art of Keeping Yourself Alive" . . . "
So . . . let me get this straight . . . first I lie down on the bank of a brook, shove my face down in the water, suck in mouthfuls water and then spew them into an unlubricated condom. Then, when the condom is full (3-4 feet long with air--I wonder how long it will be when full of water?) I’m going to swaddle it in a bandana and then carry it "carefully" (in my arms like an infant, perhaps?) through the wilderness. I guess I might survive using the process, but I’m not sure that I’d want to be rescued while in the process of surviving. Sure would give the SAR team something to discuss later over their cold beer, though :-).
Seriously, does anybody know if this condom routine has ever been used and worked in a real-world survival-type situation? I’ve only read of two cases where it was actually used in the wild. The first instance was a number of years ago when a sportsman wrote about how he used the condom to carry water from a spring to his cook pot (which of course begs the question of why he didn’t carry his cook pot to the spring, in the first place). The second time was just a couple of months ago, when a columnist for “Field and Stream Magazine” was assigned to field test an emergency survival kit he had put together and described in a previous issue. If I remember correctly, the writer used the condom from his kit to carry water to put out a "practice" survival fire that had started “too easily” to reflect what he felt represented a true survival situation.
Personally, I have used the plastic bag that I keep my emergency/first-aid kit in. It doesn’t hold much water (about 240ml) but it flattens out nicely for scooping shallow water and collecting seep-water. If water was plentiful I don’t imagine I would need to carry much and if water was really scarce, then there wouldn’t be much to carry. And if I ever have to build a survival fire and it starts too easily. . . I’ll live with the disgrace.