Fueling Quijote

It's another night, another watch. There should be less than a week remaining. Mark is talking about stopping for fuel in the Strait. I'm not convinced we'll need to, but that depends on how much we burn between here and there.

The fuel tank is still reading full, which means we haven't started using the lower tank yet. That's kind of curious because my calculations have us with 40 gallons remaining (multiplying burn rate by engine hours), but that lower tank is about 62 gallons as I understand it. So something's funny. It shouldn't be reading full. The gas gauge is wrong perhaps. Or maybe the burn rate is lower than I think it is. I'm more inclined to believe the latter as we have been very conservative with the engine RPM's.

The size of the disparity has me anxious though. I don't want to run out of gas with a meter telling me I have a full tank. I guess that's why we keep track of burn rates and engine hours. At some point I have to stop believing the gauge. I'm not quite there yet.