Hi there, I haven't seen the documentary, but does it perhaps mean that the seafaring folk of the area were Polynesian, not Filipino? (A leading theory is that the Polynesians seem to have settled the Philippines from Formosa/Taiwan originally, though I am certainly not an expert in the area.)

The Polynesian navigators are known to have explored the Pacific in double-hulled canoes and would have carried fresh water with them as a matter of course, either in pottery vessels or tightly woven baskets depending on their era and local tradition. The go-to book on Polynesia before contact is Patrick Vinton Kirch's On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact (2001); I can also recommend Paul D'Arcy's The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity and History in Oceania (2006). For more on the area, check out our books list here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/australia#wiki_oceania