I’LL NEVER FORGET THE DAY... I ran out of fuel on the approach to a TSS

ANGUS BELCHER: As a professional skipper, I have a set of rules I abide by to keep cruising as breezy as possible. Breaking the rules taught me why I need them

My friend Alan and I have spent some considerable time delivering boats to various parts of the world and along the way, we’ve learned lots of lessons. We’ve come up with many little phrases that remind us of what to do to ensure a safe passage: ‘What don’t we like? Nasty surprises’; ‘there’s old skippers and bold skippers but rarely any old bold skippers’ and particularly, ‘wee when you can, eat when you can, sleep when you can, fuel when you can.’ You don’t know when you’ll get an opportunity.

Some years ago, I was delivering a 45ft sailing boat from Southampton to Ipswich and, exactly as the previous year on a similar boat, there wasn’t a breath of wind. I had press-ganged my wife Shirley to come as crew. We had to motor to Eastbourne and then to Ramsgate. I knew from the previous year that I’d used less than a tank of fuel for the trip.

We arrived in Ramsgate, moored up opposite the fuel berth and had a welcome cuppa. I did my usual checks around the boat, one being the fuel gauge; a very sophisticated thing where you press a button, a light comes on and the gauge rises slowly to (in this instance) just under half a tank. ‘Brilliant, that’s great,’ I think. No need to mess about with fuelling, we’ve run for two days and only have a few hours across the estuary to go: I didn’t follow my own rule.

We left the next morning to another lovely windless day. I rechecked the fuel gauge – yep, perfect! Past North Foreland, running at a steady 7 knots, something began to niggle at the back of my mind. Little calculations ran unbidden through my head about quantity and horsepower and time. They kept going round and round, and then I remembered how nice it had been last year when we had sailed this particular bit in a nice breeze… I went down to check the fuel gauge. We had been running for two hours and were about to cross the Sunk VTS TSS, the ship’s motorway into the Thames.

The gauge barely moved off its stop, deep in the red. According to the gauge, the boat had used just over half a tank in 22 hours and just under half a tank in two hours. My stomach knotted, not because we were in a dangerous situation – the water was shallow, we could anchor and wait for breeze and the tide to turn and, at the moment, the engine was still running – but because running out of fuel would look really silly on the part of a professional skipper!

The fuel tank was under the bunk in the starboard cabin. Out came the cushions, out came the berth top and I went to work with a screwdriver on the sender unit. With the sender out, I could see the problem. The tank tapered and the sender was a swinging arm type, meaning that what the gauge thought was half was 10% of the capacity! Great.

There was some diesel swilling about the floor of the tank and, thankfully, some in a sump where the pickup pipe draws from. We slowed the boat to 4.5 knots to conserve what little fuel we had.

Then I saw them – fishing boats, lots of them. And what do fishing boats have on board? Diesel!

I took to motoring amongst the fishermen shouting out, “Diesel… Do you have any spare diesel?” My pride was stowed away and I was humbled. At last I got the reply: “We’ve got 20 litres in a can, you can have that if you like!”

It was like being offered gold. We pulled alongside and happily paid for the diesel, the can and a drink for the crew. I poured the diesel directly in the tank and miraculously, the gauge now read nearly half!

We motored on with grateful thanks to our fishing friends. Number one rule… ‘Wee when you can, eat when you can, sleep when you can, FUEL WHEN YOU CAN.’ I’ve never broken it since.

The boat had used half a tank in 22 hours and another half a tank in two hours. The fuel gauge was deep in the red