Best dry bags

A one-ounce rain liner that packs to a golf ball. The right answer for keeping a sleeping bag dry, and the wrong one for a canoe.

This is the one most people should buy, and the one most often described wrongly. Inside a pack it is excellent: your sleeping bag and spare layers stay dry through a day of rain for an ounce of weight and almost no volume. Three of them in different sizes also solve pack organization, which is a bigger daily benefit than the waterproofing.

What it is not is submersible. Siliconized fabric and a taped seam handle rain and splash; hold the bag underwater and water will work through the roll-top. If your bag is going in a canoe, strapped to a raft, or anywhere it might be dunked, buy the welded-seam pick below. Our <a href="/camp/best-camping-pillows">camping pillows</a> roundup covers the stuffed-clothes pillow trick these are also good for.

Welded seams, heavy vinyl, and a roll-top designed to be submerged. The pick for paddling and anything strapped outside a boat.

The distinction between this and the pick above is the single most useful thing on this page. Welded seams have no stitch holes at all, and the closure is engineered for the pressure of submersion rather than for shedding rain. If there is any realistic chance the bag goes under, this is the category you want.

The cost is weight and bulk, and it is substantial. Nobody carries one of these up a mountain for rain protection. The correct setup for a mixed trip is usually both: light dry sacks inside the pack for organization and rain, and one heavy welded bag for the camera, phone, keys and anything genuinely unreplaceable.

A light dry sack with a translucent panel and an air-purge valve. Minor features that save real time at camp.

The translucent panel sounds trivial until you are looking for one specific item in the dark with four identical stuff sacks in front of you. Combined with a color-coded set, it removes the single most annoying part of using dry bags for organization.

The purge valve is the better feature. Air trapped in a rolled dry bag keeps it round, which wastes a surprising amount of pack space; pushing it out through a one-way valve lets the bag take the shape of the pack. Treat the valve as the thing most likely to fail eventually, and keep this bag for clothes rather than for the one item that must stay dry.

Heavy PVC tarpaulin at a low price, usually with a phone pouch thrown in. Fine for a beach or a boat, too heavy to carry far.

This is the car-and-beach pick. The material is thick enough to be careless with, the price is low, and for a day on the water or a wet-gear bag in the trunk it is entirely adequate. The shoulder strap on bigger sizes makes it usable as a portage bag over short distances.

What it is not is a backpacking item. The weight penalty against a silnylon sack is large, and it does not compress at all when empty. Treat the bundled clear phone pouch with suspicion: pouches of that type are splash protection, and a phone is worth more than the test. Our <a href="/road-trip/car-camping-gear-checklist">car camping gear checklist</a> has it in the wet-gear slot.

Lighter urethane-coated fabric with welded seams -- most of the submersion resistance of vinyl at noticeably less weight.

If you want one bag that covers both jobs, this is the compromise to look at. Welded seams and a dedicated roll-top give you real submersion resistance; urethane-coated nylon rather than vinyl keeps the weight down to something you would actually carry on a hike.

The reason it is fifth rather than first is that most people are better served by owning both ends of the range: several nearly weightless sacks for inside the pack, and one tough bag for the things that cannot get wet. This bag is the right single answer for someone who paddles and hikes the same gear and does not want two sets.