Our first day in Hilo was spent relaxing and wondering at the fact that our boat somehow brought us to Hawaii.
Our second day, it was back to work at boat chores. Over the course of the two week passage, we of course ate through a fair bit of our food. And the constant motion of the boat meant that there were various screws and nuts to tighten and fittings to inspect for leaks.
We became good at filling these…
Our plan is to head around the bottom of the Big Island and then up the west side – that’s the side that faces away from the trade winds, so there’s typically no wind. That means that we need to top off the fuel tanks.
Of course, there is no recreational fuel dock in Hilo. The commercial fuel truck will deliver to you if you take more than 200 gallons, but we only needed 40-50 to fill the tank.
So, we borrowed a couple jerry jugs from another boat in the anchorage, supplemented our jug with an extra from an auto parts store, and headed for the local Shell station in our rental car.
Rattle siphon in action
Each jerry jug holds 5 gallons – 4 jugs in total and more than 40 gallons to fill means three trips to the gas station, three walks from the parking lot to the dinghy, three rows from the beach back to the boat, and three hoists of the jerry jugs onto the deck. The project took most of the afternoon.
Chips and salsa with two Miguel’s
To actually transfer the fuel from the jug to Madrone’s tank, we used a rattle siphon tube. There’s a check valve that uses a small ball at one end – to use it, we just put the check valve in the jerry jug, “rattle” the check valve up and down, and sure enough a steady flow starts up from the jug and then down into the tank. Each jerry jug took about 5 minutes to siphon out.
We rewarded ourselves with a big plate of al pastor tacos at Lucy’s Taqueria. Delicious!
The second (and hopefully lesser?) Miguel
