Fuel problems and a little drama

After a windy night in Loch Tarbert we set out for Mull and the second drama in 10 days! An hour out the wind died completely so we started to engine. It wasn’t long before it died. I have a problem with polluted fuel that I am in the process of dealing with that involves adding chemicals to the tank, the pollution gets dissolved and gets caught in the fuel filters. The downside is that the filters soon get blocked and need changing regularly  it seemed that the bug had beaten me to it, no matter, change the filters, an operation I have performed several times and off we go again; sadly it wasn’t that simple. Having changed the filters I couldn’t get the fuel to come through, the little hand pump was pumping fresh air and I didn’t know why. Now we had a problem, no wind, no engine and drifting ½ mile off a rocky shore. Time to call the cavalry. I put out a call to the coastguard on the radio, no answer, the had some big hills between us and him and VHF radio is line of sight, the problem just got bigger. However, over the horizon sailed our saviour in the form of a big square rigged sailing ship, Stavros Emarcos (which I think is the ship I took my sister Jenny on for a day for her 50^th birthday!).

Not only could I call her but she would probably have an engineer on board. I did and they did! They put him in a boat and sent him over while they stood by. It took us half an hour but he did get the engine going, showing me how to prime the pump to help the fuel through and left with profuse thanks. Sadly that wasn’t the end of the tale; within 10 minutes the engine had died again. By this time the wind was back up and we were heading the same way as the Stavros so we sailed in company while I tried again with the engine again and again and again, 5 times I got it started as the engineer had showed me and then died again, I was now scratching my head and more than a little concerned.

The engineer had misdiagnosed the problem. After much head scratching, discussion with Rob (who had taken the helm through all this) and sucking of diesel by mouth to determine where I had fuel flow and where I did not (the taste was repeating on me for many hours afterwards!) I dismantled the fuel filtration system (something I should have thought of from the start but then hindsight is a wonderful thing) and found a blob of black gunge in the pipe connection to the filter housing. Now that could be the problem! Start her up again, cross fingers and wait. 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10, 15 – we had cracked it and with a major sigh of relief headed for Mull and a very large dose of  wine!

We anchored overnight in Loch Spelve on the east coast of Mull. The entrance to the loch is a narrow channel, about half way in we nearly ran over a sea otter who quickly swam out of our way rolled onto his back and gave us the eye whilst chomping on whatever was for tea held in his mouth. The loch is full of mussel farms so we collected our mussel scrumping gear and had a large bowl of fresh mussels to help our large dose of wine on its way; everything was looking better with the world!

Saturday was another windy damp day. We sailed over to Oban in the now standard issue force 6 and went ashore for supplies and to pick up David Munden, my next crew member.