October 2018

My wife, teenage son, and I are circumnavigating aboard our 42-foot Tayana sailboat Kandu, currently waiting for a replacement freshwater pump for our Yanmar engine in Agadir, Morocco, in preparation for our trip to the Canary Islands. I have some time to pass on some how-to’s we’ve learned over the past 4 years of cruising. Diesel fueling is a frequent chore on our boat.

DIESEL STORAGE: In order to motor distances greater than Kandu’s 500-liter tanks would allow, like when we motored thousands of miles through the pirate zone north of Somalia, and up the Red Sea, to minimize how often we have to go to fuel docks, we’ve loaded Kandu up with 320-liters of cannisters or Gerry jugs. In a Belgian museum, we learned that the term “Gerry jug” comes from WWII US G.I. slang for fuel cannisters modeled after those used by the German military. “Gerry” was slang for a German, thus Gerry jugs.

RECYCLED or REPURPOSED JUGS: In the US, sailors buy their Gerry jugs complete with nozzles, whereas the rest of the world uses alternatives which are free and readily available sans nozzle, converting 20-25 liter heavy duty plastic motor oil, coolant, and/or vegetable oil containers into diesel jugs. In Gibraltar, smugglers loaded with jugs of fuel throw overboard their empty and sometimes full jugs. Each morning, fishermen collect the discarded jugs. That’s how we got our last five 25-liter jugs, from Pepe, a helpful man you got them from a fisherman. The jugs interiors are cleaned with soap and water and then rinsed out with diesel that is discarded to provide a container ready to top up.

GASKETS: Not designed for re-use, these types of recycled jugs often leak fuel from their caps. The standard third-world solution is to cut squares from recycled plastic bags and screw them on between the cap and the jug, a poor man’s gasket. These gaskets are good for one or two uses before they fall apart and need replacing.

FILTERING: Diesel engines require clean fuel to run properly, free of debris and water. We rarely take fuel directly into our tanks without filtering it through our specifically engineered water fuel filter funnel; diesel is able to pass through the filter’s fine screen but amazingly, water does not. Water molecules are too large and don’t pass through the fine mesh.

SYPHONING: To migrate the fuel from a Gerry jug into one of our three tanks, we set the jug such that its bottom is above the level of the deck fitting and then use a syphon hose with a chambered glass ball that when shaken gets the syphoning action going without having to suck fuel in with our mouths and risk swallowing and/or breathing it in. An alternative way to get the syphoning action to start is to place a short second hose alongside the syphoning hose with a firmly held (air tight) rag, and blow through it to cause the air pressure to initiate the syphoning action.

And lastly, old-school, just dip the hose as far you can into the jug without losing it. Place your thumb firmly over the hose’s opening, and quickly pull the hose out, drawing with it the fuel that filled the hose, releasing your thumb.