How many of your diesel fuel tanks have erupted leaks, pouring its contents into the holding compartment. BLESS the holding compartment! Diesel fuel, like gasoline, is a hydrocarbon-based fuel. Short-term exposure such as when you fuel your truck or clean up a small spill, can temporarily irritate your eyes, skin or respiratory tract and/or cause dizziness, headache or nausea. However, longer-term exposure may lead to more serious health concerns, such as lung cancer, kidney damage, and increased risk of heart attack. Obviously Diesel is nothing to fool around with.
I should perhaps say at this point, one of these days I’ll post a blog about fun boating things, the bliss of being on the water, wind in our hair and sun smiling down on us, but in the meantime my stories are about fixing the boat, cleaning the boat, waxing the boat, refinishing the teak, applying elbow grease and breaking our backs working in tight quarters. Work, work and more work you say? Well to me this necessary, topical maintenance still rests in the fun category, I love that we are rejuvenating our boat, making her shine, but I don’t like when systems break down, the heavy maintenance repairs, the expensive jobs. Gregg tells me this is all a part of boat ownership, and Catalyst is 28 years old, so she occasionally needs more than a Band-Aid fix.
So about eight inches (at its deepest point) of fuel was sloshing about under my berth sending a cloud of fumes around my head. I sleep in the aft berth backwards to how it was intended in the layout drawings. I don’t like my pillows at the end of a mattress unsupported by a wall. I prop up and read at night, so I turned the blankets and pillows around and my feet are where my head was supposed to go. It’s a bit close, like lying in an over-sized coffin, and a bit tricky to crawl out of without bumping my head but comfortable when sleeping. We installed a reading light which has a red bulb so others can sleep, and that red glow doesn’t attract no-see-ums, before when wearing a head lamp, they would land on my book in clusters as they rushed to the white light. The red glow is also a better transition from light to darkness for sleep.
So my head is pretty much right over the holding area gap between the tank and the wall. The fuel had leaked, over half a foot of it that sloshed back and forth under and around the tank every time the boat gently swayed in the water. When it pooled under my head area the fumes drifted up around the mattress and my pillows to fill my nostrils with its strong, sickening stench. I don’t do well with gasoline and diesel fumes; headaches form and my glands puff in my neck as the toxins invade my body.
Waking an uncustomary amount of times through the night, as my headache grew I wondered why it? I went up to the cockpit and used a flashlight to see if our boat was leaking, looking for the skim of oil on the surface but there was nothing. Later that night as the smell seemed to grow stronger, I opened the small cockpit window that is in the aft birth area thinking once again that the smell was coming from the outside, someone else’s boat problem leaching into the night, but the air coming in smelled a heck of a lot better than what was seeping out. I assumed then that the smell was coming from the engine that was only a thin wall away from where I was bunking. It was a pitiful night’s sleep and in the morning I told Gregg about the fumes and he and a friend went looking for the source. It was quite the surprise finding the yellowish culprit free standing below my bunk. We had the boat hauled soon after.
Unfortunately, Catalyst always smelled of diesel so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to have trace hints of it, but this was more concentrated. The engine came with problems and an oily surface was always skimming the top of the rain water in the bilge from various leaks we hadn’t located yet. Almost pretty with its shimmering iridescence, the rainbow of colours was an oily bitch to remove. We went through a lot of dish detergent to get rid of the greasy residue and Dawn, good to its name, removed it. So I grew accustomed to the odor as if it was Catalyst’s personal scent. Friends complained about it every time they came on board but ours had been a salt water girl and used harder than their boat that lived on a lake for most of its life and was as pampered like a baby. Through inexperience I didn’t know how a boat should smell and with the engine sitting behind a thin piece of plywood only inches away from the living space, I thought it natural to be living with odors.
After the engine had died and been fixed three times, the smell of diesel had dulled to a standstill but now it seemed back with a vengeance. The weird thing was that the fumes would come and go every minute or so. I didn’t realize the rocking and spinning of the boat on the anchor was the reason and why should I? How did we know that the 28 year old tank below my berth had reached its life span and picked that week to finish chewing its way through the metal, allowing it to leak? Luckily for us the tank sat in a sealed holding area, with a wall of batteries on the other side. More importantly, we’re lucky diesel isn’t highly flammable! If it hadn’t been self-contained it would have leaked everywhere and found its way under the floor boards, splashing up along her sides behind all the build ins, permeating the entire belly of her beamy bottom. We would have had to dismantle everything in the cabin to clean underneath. It would have been a disaster and we’d have to wear hazmat suits and masks on our weekend jaunts to the islands until the smell faded away.
Luckily it was the end of the season, we hauled the boat and Gregg removed the old tank. He ordered a new one to be made over the winter. He gave the old one to Peter Tanner in Blue Rocks to use as a template and Gregg requested it to be built a half inch shorter so he could put soft bracing beneath it to prevent future chaffing which caused the breakdown and holes. The stainless tank came shiny and new and Gregg installed it in the spring, filled it with diesel and fired up the engine. No leaks. No odor. Our boat now smells awesome, well, not as awesome as a bouquet of flowers, it is an old boat after all, but pleasant is an accurate descriptor. Just another tale to write in the book of Catalyst II, Nonsuch extraordinaire.
I should perhaps say at this point, one of these days I’ll post a blog about fun boating things, the bliss of being on the water, wind in our hair and sun smiling down on us, but in the meantime my stories are about fixing the boat, cleaning the boat, waxing the boat, refinishing the teak, applying elbow grease and breaking our backs working in tight quarters. Work, work and more work you say? Well to me this necessary, topical maintenance still rests in the fun category, I love that we are rejuvenating our boat, making her shine, but I don’t like when systems break down, the heavy maintenance repairs, the expensive jobs. Gregg tells me this is all a part of boat ownership, and Catalyst is 28 years old, so she occasionally needs more than a Band-Aid fix.
So about eight inches (at its deepest point) of fuel was sloshing about under my berth sending a cloud of fumes around my head. I sleep in the aft berth backwards to how it was intended in the layout drawings. I don’t like my pillows at the end of a mattress unsupported by a wall. I prop up and read at night, so I turned the blankets and pillows around and my feet are where my head was supposed to go. It’s a bit close, like lying in an over-sized coffin, and a bit tricky to crawl out of without bumping my head but comfortable when sleeping. We installed a reading light which has a red bulb so others can sleep, and that red glow doesn’t attract no-see-ums, before when wearing a head lamp, they would land on my book in clusters as they rushed to the white light. The red glow is also a better transition from light to darkness for sleep.
So my head is pretty much right over the holding area gap between the tank and the wall. The fuel had leaked, over half a foot of it that sloshed back and forth under and around the tank every time the boat gently swayed in the water. When it pooled under my head area the fumes drifted up around the mattress and my pillows to fill my nostrils with its strong, sickening stench. I don’t do well with gasoline and diesel fumes; headaches form and my glands puff in my neck as the toxins invade my body.
Waking an uncustomary amount of times through the night, as my headache grew I wondered why it? I went up to the cockpit and used a flashlight to see if our boat was leaking, looking for the skim of oil on the surface but there was nothing. Later that night as the smell seemed to grow stronger, I opened the small cockpit window that is in the aft birth area thinking once again that the smell was coming from the outside, someone else’s boat problem leaching into the night, but the air coming in smelled a heck of a lot better than what was seeping out. I assumed then that the smell was coming from the engine that was only a thin wall away from where I was bunking. It was a pitiful night’s sleep and in the morning I told Gregg about the fumes and he and a friend went looking for the source. It was quite the surprise finding the yellowish culprit free standing below my bunk. We had the boat hauled soon after.
Unfortunately, Catalyst always smelled of diesel so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to have trace hints of it, but this was more concentrated. The engine came with problems and an oily surface was always skimming the top of the rain water in the bilge from various leaks we hadn’t located yet. Almost pretty with its shimmering iridescence, the rainbow of colours was an oily bitch to remove. We went through a lot of dish detergent to get rid of the greasy residue and Dawn, good to its name, removed it. So I grew accustomed to the odor as if it was Catalyst’s personal scent. Friends complained about it every time they came on board but ours had been a salt water girl and used harder than their boat that lived on a lake for most of its life and was as pampered like a baby. Through inexperience I didn’t know how a boat should smell and with the engine sitting behind a thin piece of plywood only inches away from the living space, I thought it natural to be living with odors.
After the engine had died and been fixed three times, the smell of diesel had dulled to a standstill but now it seemed back with a vengeance. The weird thing was that the fumes would come and go every minute or so. I didn’t realize the rocking and spinning of the boat on the anchor was the reason and why should I? How did we know that the 28 year old tank below my berth had reached its life span and picked that week to finish chewing its way through the metal, allowing it to leak? Luckily for us the tank sat in a sealed holding area, with a wall of batteries on the other side. More importantly, we’re lucky diesel isn’t highly flammable! If it hadn’t been self-contained it would have leaked everywhere and found its way under the floor boards, splashing up along her sides behind all the build ins, permeating the entire belly of her beamy bottom. We would have had to dismantle everything in the cabin to clean underneath. It would have been a disaster and we’d have to wear hazmat suits and masks on our weekend jaunts to the islands until the smell faded away.
Luckily it was the end of the season, we hauled the boat and Gregg removed the old tank. He ordered a new one to be made over the winter. He gave the old one to Peter Tanner in Blue Rocks to use as a template and Gregg requested it to be built a half inch shorter so he could put soft bracing beneath it to prevent future chaffing which caused the breakdown and holes. The stainless tank came shiny and new and Gregg installed it in the spring, filled it with diesel and fired up the engine. No leaks. No odor. Our boat now smells awesome, well, not as awesome as a bouquet of flowers, it is an old boat after all, but pleasant is an accurate descriptor. Just another tale to write in the book of Catalyst II, Nonsuch extraordinaire.
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