Kaimusailing

When I awoke in Georgetown harbor the smell from the paper mill was blowing the other way. When I arrived the smell was pretty bad. Overnight the temperatures dropped and there was frost on the deck. It was cold and I wanted to stay in my bunk.
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Finally at about 9:30 I made breakfast and tried to warm the galley with the little propane heater. The propane tanks were empty. One was completely empty and the other was only good for a flame to make coffee and cheese omelet. When I compared the weight of the two it seemed that the one hooked up to the stove still had some propane, so I brought the really empty tank and a shopping list to Walmart. The Uber ride cost about 7 dollars. After I returned I stowed provisions and took a nap.
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I awoke and something was bothering me, I had ordered spare water separation filters to replace the one I had thrown away, but when I checked the tracking number it was on its way to the post office at Georgetown, which is what I wanted, but the seller was sending it 2nd day UPS, who does not deliver to post offices. I tried to log onto my UPS account but was unable. The account information was probably on some long dead laptop. It was 2:30 AM, so I went back to sleep.
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In the morning I called the local UPS store to change the delivery location and was told that the UPS store was a privately owned franchise and couldn’t do what I wanted. I called UPS, 1-800 PICKUPS. The prerecorded menu gave no option to change delivery or talk to an agent until I went through several submenus. Then when I got a chance to speak with a human being I was told that the seller had to make that change with UPS, not me, the buyer.
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The seller had no phone number on the email announcement of “your item has shipped”. I went to their website and found an 800 number. I eventually got a pleasant customer service person who acted like changing the delivery location was something that never ever happened. “But UPS said you need to initiate that change, you need to call UPS.” She said maybe we would have to wait until the item arrived. But she would call UPS. Later my cell phone rang and yes, the product would be sent to the local UPS store and arrive on Martin Luther King Day. Perfect.
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I was anxious to get underway and continue my journey, but I also knew I was not feeling too good about things. I had a 22 gallon tank of bad fuel and had to do something with it, and there was no easy solution. The Suzuki dealer in Southport had suggested using a transfer pump to get the fuel out. They didn’t offer anything to get the fuel out, but they did get the engine running again and it was strong as ever, no worse for wear.
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Maybe I could start a siphon, which we had done several times on yacht deliveries, and put some of the fuel into the clear plastic carboy. I could see if the fuel was bad, not sure what I would do with it. It’s hard to dispose of 22 gallons of gasoline.
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I put the carboy in the bottom of the engine sled, lowered to its lowest. I took the “bad” fuel primer bulb and jammed it into a long length of clear vinyl tubing. I took the fuel barb off the new fuel hose and jammed it into the other end of the vinyl hose. If I had tried to use the new fuel hose to siphon the bad gas, the new fuel hose would be contaminated. Using just the fuel barb meant I only had to clean the fuel barb, then I could reuse it in the new fuel line.
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It didn’t work. I could only pump a little spurt of fuel when I squeezed the bulb, but there were air bubbles in the line and no siphon action happened. The end of the line was well below the level of the fuel in the tank, so the problem was with air leaks. I remembered a siphon pump that Ron the carpenter had given me some time ago in the boatyard. I had used it to pump bad fuel way back before I relaunched Kaimu. I found it. There was no way to match it up to the vinyl hose, but I took it apart and removed the input rigid tubing from it and poked the vinyl hose into it. It kind of worked but there was still air in the line and no siphon action. I taped the vinyl hose connection to the siphon pump and that seemed to work better, but still no siphon action.
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I had at this point pumped about a quart of fuel into the carboy and had spent about an hour doing that. I put cable ties on the fuel barb at the main tank to try to prevent air from getting into the line there and it helped some, but no siphon action. Maybe I had two quarts.
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I found my tube of gasket sealer in a zip lock bag with a small brush that was in a smaller bag. I removed the fuel barb from the main tank and painted some sealer where it came in contact with the tank fitting. I zip tied it all back together. Now we had siphon action and fuel began flowing into the carboy like it should.
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It was still slow going and I had time to do some reading, make lunch, and now and then pour the fuel into empty jerry cans through the Baja filter funnel. I’m pretty sure the fuel is OK. At the end of the afternoon all the jerry cans were full, we had the same amount of fuel available in the jerry cans as when we left Grande Dunes, plus the carboy was almost full.
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I had researched the next leg of the trip to Charleston and it was way more than 50 miles, plus the waterways were confusing, crisscrossing each other, I would have to be careful navigating this stretch. Probably have to anchor for a night somewhere along the way. These were not the open river waterways that I could negotiate in the dark, these were narrow canals with lots of places to make a mistake and get off the ICW.
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The image is from OpenCPN and it shows a part of the maze of waterways between Georgetown and Charleston.