Friday night, November 10, about 22:00 hours and still becalmed about 80 miles south-east of Hampton Roads, I noticed a vessel's lights and started tracking it. What we do is take hand-held compass bearings on vessels; if the compass bearing relative to our own course does not change, and especially if it becomes larger, we need to take action to prevent a collision. We were completely becalmed with no wind. First I tried to hail them on VHF radio, channel 16, with no answer. Then, as we became increasingly concerned, we decided to turn on the motor and get out of the way ourselves; as a sailing vessel, we do have right of way, but that is often ignored on the high seas. The engine started, then sputtered, and died. It would not restart and sounded starved of fuel. We thought we had close to a full tank.

The priority now was to draw attention to ourselves. We got out our big spotlight, shone the light on the main sail, and also pointed the beam straight out at the ship. That got their attention and they changed course. We realized we were on the south and west side of the Gulf Stream, and shipping heading south will use this corridor to get out of the Stream's pull north-east.

Now we had to figure out the engine. On taking the cover off, we immediately spotted diesel fuel - the engine pan was full, and the bilge under the engine was full of pink diesel fuel. We spotted the secondary fuel filter casing, which was just hanging on by a thread. After our engine work in Chesapeake, the mechanic had neglected to tighten up the fuel filter casing, and our tank's diesel fuel had dribbled out into the pan and overflowed into the bilge. The bilge pump had probably gone on while we were motoring out the inlet and we hadn't heard it. We had just lost over three-quarters of all the diesel fuel we brought with us. The fuel canister is pictured above, after we tightened it.

After tightening the fuel filter, we used our new sipon pump to put a jerry jug of diesel from our deck jugs into the main tank, tried to bleed the engine of air, and restart. No go that night, and after discussing our options, we decided we had to turn back. Without enough back-up diesel to use and only 80 miles out, we had lost our ability to motor for a day or two if we needed to, in a storm or calms. So we reluctantly turned our bow north west and waited for some wind.

The next morning we reported in on our ham radio to the Waterway Radio Club and talked to our friend Rick in Charleston. We had him call TowBoat/US to alert them of our condition (engine won't start and no wind), and had him call the boatyard where the work was done. As the wind filled in that day, we had a fine sail back to Norfolk, while Larry worked on the engine. After bleeding the injectors, he finally got it started. We transferred all fuel in jerry jugs on deck (about 22 gallons) into the tank for our motor in the inlet.