Having seen what comes out of a boat drain hole -- spilled fuel and oil, battery acid, bird droppings, all sorts of rancid bait and fish goo -- I'd be interested to see how usable the water would be. Certainly better than nothing, but the fuel and oil seem worrisome.

The much anticpated storm was not what was expected. Depending on the area, the winds were gusting up to 45-60 miles per hour along with very heavy rain with Friday afternoon being the worst. In a period of 3 days, collectively close to 200,000 homes were without power for varying duration. I was impressed with our provincial electrical company aka BC Hydro For this storm, a lot of their crews were preementively located to many areas before the storm hit and it paid off as they were able to quickly restore power as the outages occurred. Last I looked on Monday, less then 1500 homes were without power.

As for us we lost power on Friday but it was only for a brief time. However when the power came back on, we took a couple of strong surges and 2 kitchen lights blew and on bulb actually shattered as somehow we had missed turning off that switch when the power intially went out. Other then that, no other damage to report.

The heavy rain lasted all weekend then slowed somewhat into Monday and Tuesday. After some real heavy rain early this morning the afternoon was actually sunny for awhile. Ironically though we lost power late this afternoon, but again, it was only briefly. Not sure the reason, but doubtful it had anything to do with the weather.

Tonight we are back to rain which is going to stay with us throughout the weekend. This month alone we have received just shy of 200 mm (7.5 inches) of rain of which - almost 90% has been since this past Friday. Oh the joys of living in the wet PNW.

I had previously posted about using our aluminum boat as a rain collector. From Friday through Sunday morning, I let the rain collect then emptied the boat. Altogether, 16 pails were emptied out of the boat. That equals to 320 liters (70 imperial gallons) which is 84 US gallons.

From Sunday through to today, the boat collected about the same amount of water. Although we did not need the water, it was still a good experiment to test for possible future use for a longer term power outages and when mains water is also out.

Sorry, no image of the inside of the boat with the water in it as the only picture I took was way out of focus and did not realize until after the fact.

As for bird droppings, you have drank water from a lake or river at some point in your life, right?

(English is not my native language, so they may have a different name).