The Tomlin-Davies Crew on Annalee

There has been no blog post for a few days as we've had, what seems like an escalating set of problems that needed sorting. On our way to Golfe de Juan - for what was planned to be a one-night stopover to refuel, water and visit the international fireworks display in Cannes - we experienced more engine running problems.

The skipper duly changed the filters and cleaned things out and... the engine started, ran for a minute and died. A further inspection revealed no fuel reaching the injectors from the fuel pump (a good thing as it turns out). Fearing a broken fuel pump, then engineer was called in and after the best part of Friday was taken with him disassembling the fuel system from the tank forward, he took out the primary fuel filter and took it apart before presenting me with a bag of black oily, jelly like sludge. We have the dreaded fuel 'bug', a fungus that grows in water and feeds on diesel fuel, the fungus forms a colony of sticky gunk that coats all the tank surfaces and contaminates the fuel lines etc. The pic shows the inside of the tank - it should all be a shiny metallic color - not black! If you've ever had to clean out the shower trap of the soap/hair gunk you will get the picture!

The bug comes from taking on board dirty fuel contaminated with water. Unfortunately it's really hard to tell if you are doing this as the water and dirt are all dissolved in the fuel when it is being pumped at high pressure into the tank, but when the boat is sitting still it all separates out. It seems as if somewhere along our journeys we've picked up a bad batch of fuel.

We had to call in the engineers to clean the fuel tanks, they guy arrived on a barge, moored up to us and pumped away our dirty fuel -literally 100l of diesel down the proverbial drain! He then proceeded to clean the black gunk coating the tank, things were looking promising until he came to a baffle (wall welded into the tank to stop fuel sloshing around as the boat moves). He put a scope behind the wall to find bad contamination there also but was unable to access it to clean. So we are now waiting for another engineer to come on Monday morning to cut a hole in the tank and fit an inspection hatch to clean the other half out. Hopefully we will then be able to be on one our way back to Barcelona - a few euros lighter!

The crew has made good use of our time in the marina, exploring inland to Monaco, Nice and Grasse. There are lots of photos loaded on the album of their adventures - including trying multiple strange flavours of ice cream and making perfume.

Once we are underway, again we will mainly use the photo uploads to update what we are doing as the sailblogs site can be hard to update when we are on the move.