Wot? No fuel?

When the engine stopped off Lundy we got the sails up and ignored it.

Once on passage with time I started trying to work out what was wrong. As it had just stopped, it was probably a fuel problem but a quick check showed we had not run out.

I got out Nigel Calder's book on Diesel engines. The trouble-shooting guide confirmed fuel as the most likely cause and an air bubble as the likely problem. This didn't seem unlikely given the amount we had been being thrown about at anchor.

I started tracing the low pressure fuel system. Calder's book is excellent and I found the main filter, which unfortunately doesn't have a sight glass, and the lift pump and the secondary filter.

The lift pump doesn't seem to have a removable top so I got the bleed screw off the secondary filter and started pumping the lift pump manually. Nothing.

So I undid the fuel pipe to the lift pump. It was dry.

Finally, after much thinking I went to look for the impossible. It just couldn't be the cocks on the tanks. I looked at the port tank which we thought might be closed and it was closed so I opened it.

Then I looked at the starboard tank which we knew must be open because we had been using it for days.

It was closed.

That can't possibly happen. There is no way that cock can close on its own, you have to push it in quite hard.

It was closed.

As Arthur Conan Doyle said "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

That'll teach us.

The engine worked after I opened the fuel cocks.