LandfallVoyages

After a marathon effort by all three of us we finally launched Landfall last week. This is good. It’s really good.

The only water intrusion was through one small through-hull seacock. We plan to use it later for our saltwater foot pump for washing dishes but we don’t need to hook all of that up yet. The valve wasn’t quite closed and there was a small dribble through the hose barb until we closed the valve and then there was nothing more to do. We had our whole damage control kit at the ready, hammers standing by to pound soft wooden plugs into holes that were threatening to sink the boat and tools ready to tighten leaking whatevers but none were needed. We prepared well.

We haven’t been able to run the engine much with the boat up in the yard but now that it’s in the water we can run it all we want. It’s been hard to get it running perfectly. It is perfect on new fuel but we have over 50 gallons of fuel ($250.00) in the tanks that’s at least 6 years old. Diesel engines don’t like old fuel and old Perkins 4.108’s certainly don’t like it. We scrubbed the fuel by pumping it through a pre-filter, a small electric pump, and through the Racor fuel filter. We let it circulate for about 20 hours and replaced the filters several times and that got all of the water and all of the chunks out of it. Then we added some diesel tank conditioner that contained a lot of isopropyl alcohol from the smell of it and that helped to integrate the moisture that was left in the tank bus it still wouldn’t run quite right. We bled the fuel system many times to insure that we had all of the air out and it finally occurred to me today that some critical ingredient in the diesel may be missing. Something evaporated out or somehow lost it’s effectiveness maybe. I zipped back to the auto parts store for some more fuel additives and found a product that made all the difference.

Power Service makes a magic juice called Diesel Kleen + Cetane Boost. If you’re dealing with old stinky diesel fuel then this is just the stuff that you need. I poured in a pint and within 10 minutes of running the engine finally smoothed out, idled well, and got easy to start again.

This is really good. Another amazing sunset over the water and the San Francisco skyline.