On either side of our boat, embedded into the deck, there are two deck fills about two feet apart. The forward pair has the word WATER cast into the bronze, the aft pair DEISEL.

I know I misspelled that. The boat was made in Taiwan and the word, cast into thousands of deck fills, was spelled wrong.

Last week we asked Eli to fill our water tanks. We carry 150 gallons of water. It takes quite a while to get 150 gallons from a hose. Seemed like it filled up awfully fast. A little while later I went out on deck and noticed that Eli had forgotten to replace the fill cap. I went to screw in on but something felt a little bit weird. Wrong part of the boat here.

The fill cap that was off was the diesel cap, not the water cap.

Umm, Eli? Eli?

You put the water in here?

The sinking look on his face just about killed me. I felt bad for the kid, really bad.

So there was about 30 gallons of water below our 40 gallons of fuel now. Removing the bulk of it was really no problem, the fuel line out of the tank was long enough to simply unscrew, let it dangle down into the bilge, and it siphoned itself. We just had to watch for when the stream changed from clear water to red diesel.

The only problem is that the fuel pickup in the tank is an inch or two above the bottom of the tank. There was still about 5 gallons of water in the bottom of the tank which would be fine until it wasn't. That would likely be at some really bad time, like trying to make it into a harbor in bad weather at night.

We decided to get ALL of the water out. We emptied the starboard water tank and filled the port side tank and moved all the tools over to the port side, thus heeling the boat almost two degrees. This forced the water over into the corner of the fuel tank. Then, we removed the top plate on the tank and with a small electric fuel pump we were able to suck out almost every drop of water. Seriously, I think that there's about 2 tablespoons left on the bottom.

We added some fuel conditioner to the tank to integrate the tiny bit of water into the fuel and to keep the sea monsters out. Weird things grow in diesel when it sits around too long.

Eli was quite relieved when he learned that we wouldn't need to throw away 40 gallons of diesel.