It’s been a fuel day

We are off again tomorrow and we are making final preparations. Deb and Steve have been shopping for our dry stores and stowing same aboard. I have been busy doing the windows in RainX, stowing gear and filling the boat with fuel.

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We started with our tanks about 1/3 full. We pressed the tanks today to full capacity. It took (gulp) two full tanker trucks like the one below.

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Iron Lady has 5 fuel tanks. One main tank forward and one main tank aft. One tank on the port side and one tank on the starboard side are used to trim the boat (keep it level). Finally, there is a day tank in the engine room.

Under normal circumstances, the two main tanks feed the day tank in the engine room via one of two pumps. During this transfer, the fuel is polished (passed thru filters and a debug unit to kill microbes prior to entering the day tank).

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The fuel is filtered a second time between the day tank and the main diesel consumers (the engine, the generator and the Kabola boiler which heats the boat and our domestic water), and then a third time on the consumers themselves.

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Engine

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Genset

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Kabola Boiler

One of the main causes of engine failure is poor fuel so we make absolutely certain that only very clean fuel gets that far.

The bill for the fuel was just delivered (double gulp) – 6,269 liters worth.

The only good news is that we don’t have to do this very often – with our range we can cross the Atlantic twice and not refuel.

Cheers

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