The Real Boating Life

The Real Boating Life

Thursday 17 September 2020

If only every day was lounging in the cockpit, swimming in crystal clear water, drinking cocktails whilst watching the sun dipping below the horizon. Well today was a real boating life day - catching up on three weeks of laundry, re-filling the propane tanks, a little grocery shopping and “polishing” the diesel in the forward fuel-tank. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun but it was actually a really good day. The dinghy was packed as we headed to shore in the morning, three sacks of laundry, two propane tanks and a bag of trash. Fortunately, we have our car parked at the dock on shore. (Rod and Sue are looking after it whilst we are away but kindly brought it down to East Greenwich for us to use the next two weeks.)

By noon we have completed some of our tasks so we made sandwiches and headed round to Paul and Fran’s to catch up with them over lunch. As ever, there was a lot of lively conversation and we ended up staying most of the afternoon. Once back on the boat we were keen to complete the cleaning of the forward diesel tank before settling down for the evening. With many jobs on the boat, half the battle is clearing stuff out of the way so that you can get to what you are trying to work on. If you are smart you remembered to get the tools you needed out of their storage area before you piled everything else on top of it! The forward diesel tank is under the V-berth where we sleep and having stripped the beds for the laundry it made sense to tackle this job before putting the sheets back on.

As some of you will know we had problems on our last trip with contaminated fuel leading to sludge in the fuel lines and all sorts of issues. Since then we have emptied and cleaned the fuel tanks by hand and I also built a rig to “polish” the fuel. This consists of a PVC tube to suck dirty fuel out of the bottom of the tank, a high capacity filter, a pump and a hose to return filtered (“polished”) fuel to the tank. It’s all contained a plastic box and it’s relatively easy to set up and seems to work well. We “polished” our main fuel tank when we launched this summer and we have seen no water or dirt coming through from that tank even when stirred up in rough conditions. However, on a bumpy day a few weeks ago we noticed that the forward tank had some water in it that was coming through to the separator. Rather than wait for that to grow bacteria and sludge we wanted to address the problem directly. So having cleaned that up we are now in a position to refill both tanks and add fresh biocide to keep them pristine. 

We celebrated completing these jobs with a delicious dinner: Swordfish sauteed in butter with leeks, lemon zest and ginger, served with white rice and homegrown tomatoes from Paul and Fran’s garden. Yummy!

So the real boating life isn’t so bad!

Mike

 

A full load in the dinghy - 3 sacks of laundry, 2 propane tanks and 1 bag of trash

The propane locker at the stern of the boat - 3 x 10 pound aluminum tanks, one in use - one hooked up ready to use and one in reserve. We tend to use about one tank every month

The fuel polishing rig that runs off 12 volts DC

Portrait of one of the pair of friendly swans that came by the boat in the late afternoon

Swordfish sauteed in butter with lemon zest, ginger and leeks. The tomatoes were from Paul and Fran's garden ... thanks!