I am a fool

Seriously.  Almost all of my problems are my own doing.  I realized this morning that I was out of fuel.  Should have seen that coming, but hadn’t been paying attention as I haven’t really gone anywhere.  But of course the generator uses fuel, and I have been on the boat for a month, and I have been out around the bay trying to run at full power on a few occasions.

Fortunately Mary was visiting, and so we made two trips – on her arrival and departure – to a gas station about 15 minutes up the road that has diesel.  Brought 40 litres each trip.  So far so good, enough to get me to Port Dover about 15 miles away tomorrow after I put the motor together.  I can refuel at the marina there.  

I ran the generator for a couple of hours to charge up batteries and really hose down the cockpit, also to make sure fuel system was ok.   Nice evening, and I was mostly outside.

When I went inside at dusk to get to work on the motor I find the bilge *full* of diesel.  Immediately remember that because I have the injection pump off the main motor I need to be concerned with fuel pumping out the open return line when I run the generator.  In fact I had made up a plug a few weeks ago when I had the pump off to prevent that from happening.  But when I pulled the pump (again) on Monday I forgot to put it in.

Cleared out the bilge with a sponge and a bucket, and got about 30 litres out.  Up to my elbows in fuel.  Put that in my two newly acquired Jerry cans, because I didn’t have any other empty containers.  I already have like 50 litres of used oil aboard, plus some dirty bilge water from an earlier cleanup.

So half the fuel I added was wasted.  I feel like I’m running a petroleum waste barge with all these tanks of dirty fuel and oil.  And I’m now nervous about getting to Port Dover on my remaining fuel.  And I still haven’t put the pump back on because I was busy mopping up the spill.  All because of my carelessness.  

Tomorrow will be a better day.