A very full tummy

We don't just come to St Peter Port because we like Guernsey (sorry local tourist board) - we also come for the nice cheaper diesel. So, after a day spent pottering around the town and walking to the super-duper Waitrose store for critical supplies (free tea and a chocolate tordsade) we had to do stuff on Wednesday. We made the long trip to St Sampsons by sea (just over 2 miles).

We had booked for fuel with the Rubis fuels office and sure enough Kevin the nice fuel truck man called us and arranged a suitably long slot around high water. A little critical as the harbour dries out....  You can see the "friendly" entrance from this chartlet. For the non-boating folks, the green bit means "it dries out" and the nice patterned bits heading for the entrance are rocks and shallow bits.

Once inside, it isn't photogenic either - but then, we just wanted a formula 1 style splash and dash. Of course, we carry a little more fuel than a race car so filling up took about an hour all told. We had pre-dosed the tanks with Stanadyne performance formula before leaving St Peter Port (remember that the Nordhavn has a day tank to supply the engine and genset so it is effectively isolated from the two storage tanks).

We have become great converts to the Stanadyne fuel additive cause. Although the blurb makes it sound like snake oil Stanadyne marketing info it really does work. Think we mentioned before how it stabilises the stored fuel and our filters come out nice and clean after a year, as it stops the nasty black asphaltenes settling out of the fuel. The biggest benefit according to the experts is the increased lubrication it gives to pumps and injectors and hence much less wear. As fuel injection kit is expensive, we like that!

For the people who like numbers, we last filled up 13 months ago almost to the day.

We took on 3874 litres @ 59p/litre (it had just come down from 62p/litre)

This fuel had taken us from Guernsey up to Scotland via Wales and the Channel islands. It then detoured to Cardiff, brought us back to Southampton and then over to Guernsey again. It also ran our generator for 246 hours and lord knows how many hours of heating during the winter. All in all, not bad!

So, for the statisticians:

13 month fuel burn:         3874 litres
Main engine hours:          338
Generator hours:             246
Wing engine hours:          6   (just to keep it working!)
Nautical miles covered:    1950 (actually a few more as the log was reading low for a while)


The likely share of fuel use (likely as there is no monitor on the genset) is:

Main engine: 2710
Wing:           34 (not worth worrying about)
Genset:        700
Heating:       430

We are quite happy with that!! If we owned a planing boat and cruised around at 20 knots, then the fuel burn for propulsion alone would have been about 8,900 litres and we would have spent lots of time worrying about where the next fuel station was. To add insult to injury, the smaller quantities you can hold and the need to buy it in the UK would have meant an average price per litre of around £1.05 (Scotland is expensive!) You can do the maths.

Adding about 3,300Kg of fuel makes us float a little lower in the water and at our usual 1475 rpm economical cruise speed it knocked about 0.4 knots off our speed and added about 0.2 litres / hour to the fuel burn at that rpm setting. The problems you have when you get porky!

And now, for the non statisticians, a quick Patrick update. He has received a reply to his job application, not from Steve but from Bronwen (his much better looking spaniel) again. Sadly, Steve has ruled Patrick out as unsuitable to captain the waterbus. This led to a morning of serious depression. First of all, he tried calling his grandma using the internal phone system on the boat:

Being an internal system, he only managed to call an empty engineroom though. Then, in desperation, he tried the VHF radio:

The coastguard was not amused. We have to keep him under much closer observation. He is clearly disturbed right now.