A gas day, in every way

I started the day working on the chart table area, I devised a way to mount the radar so it hangs down, and looks very cool, without doing too much damage to the boat. As I was cutting up some wood for this, Dave, my neighbour with the Halberg Rassey called around and offered to run me to the Gas shop, and the Gas station (see what I did there 🙂 ), for some petrol for the outboard.
So off we went, I got a huge bottle of propane/butane mix for 30RM which is about £5 and will probably last me a year. Petrol is 1.7RM / Litre, which is about 30p a Litre, but then they do make it here. Saying that, where does north sea oil come from!.

What you might not realise is that gas bottles rarely cross borders, each country around the world tends to have it’s own system with it’s own connectors, making everything incompatible. Now Sister Midnight is really an American boat, designed by and for Americans, and comes with two fancy american style 5 gallon bottles, which are almost impossible to refill outside of the Americas.
So this is where my favourite part of the day happened, Dave taught me how to drain one bottle into another with a bit of hose and some gas fittings,

I always wanted to understand how to do this, and having accomplished it, I now feel much more like a real yachtie, capable of taking on the world! Especially with two full bottles of gas in the gas locker. In this case I used a Malaysian standard to American,  but this technique will work anywhere in theory.

I also have 10 litres of fresh petrol to test out on the outboard tomorrow.

Once the sun set I returned to the chart table, mounted the radar and tried to fire it up, sadly, when I turned it on, the leds on the switch panel for the mast lights all came on very dimly, and the radar made clicking sounds. Not good, I suspect the power supply is messed up, I wonder if the radar takes it’s power from the connector block the lights are on. Oh well, all will become clear tomorrow.

Cheers, Paul C