Say Knock on Wood

Indiantown, FL
27 00.55 N 080 29.17 W

Perhaps I ought to be more superstitious. Last Friday I wrote that we intended to cruise more and to run aground less. I didn't write "knock on wood" when I said that. Guess what happened? That's right.

Less than two miles from our anchorage at Stuart we ran out of fuel. The engine just died suddenly. Of course Murphy's law applied. We had just entered a narrow channel; very narrow, only one boat length wide. It was much too narrow to anchor. As we lost speed, we lost the ability to steer and the wind blew us out of the channel. Within seconds we were aground in the mud.

Oh well, first things first. I had to get the engine restarted. I changed the valves to draw from the full port side tank instead of the empty starboard one. Next, we had to suck fuel into the engine and restart. Fortunately, our new Beta engine was unlike our old Perkins engine. It self-purges air from the fuel lines, making this procedure a whole lot easier. It won't however, suck enough to refill the fuel filter bowl. I had to do that by hand.

It wasn't the first time we ran out of fuel. I learned by experience to keep a jar with 6 ounces of diesel fuel stored in the lazarette next to the propane tanks. I fetched the jar and used the fuel to refill the fuel filter bowl. After that, I simply cranked the engine for about 60 seconds and finally it roared to life.

The next job was to refloat Tarwathie. It wasn't difficult. We ran into the mud at near zero speed and with a gentle wind pushing us so we weren't stuck very hard. I just gave it full speed reverse and we backed out without problem.

OK. Emergency over. Now to explain how I allowed us to run out of fuel by surprise. Just the night before I checked the oil and the fuel level. It looked fine. You see we have sight glasses on the fuel tanks. You can see in the glass how high the fuel is in the tank. It is similar to the sight glasses used on big coffee urns to show how much coffee is left. The trouble is that the inside of the glasses get stained by the fuel. When the tank is partially full I can discern the slight color difference between fuel and air. However, when completely full or completely empty the glasses look about the same. I looked at an empty tank and thought it was full. I also forgot when the last time was we refueled (11/13/2009 according to our log book).

Our remedy is to revise our standard procedure. We're going to add engine hours to our daily entries in the log book. Then we can estimate fuel remaining without looking at the sight glasses. 32 hours per tank and 64 hours total are the magic numbers.

Why don't we change the plumbing to draw from both tanks at once? Because if we did, when we ran out of fuel we would really be up the creek without an engine.

p.s. I've been trying for 4 years to find replacement glass, acrylic, or lexan tubes to replace the stained sight glasses with new ones. I've failed to find anything suitable. A few candidates turned sour because the material was unsuitable to hold diesel fuel. On one tank I put in clear vinyl hose to replace a cracked glass, but the vinyl turned brown in just a few weeks.

p.p.s. This is the first blog posted by SSB radio in many months.