Fill ´er up!

Fuel tank gauges have a habit of ‘failing dangerous’ and many a yacht has had her diesel splutter to an ignominious halt with the gauge still reading encouragingly full. The answer is to run a column in your log book for ‘engine’. With ‘on’ and ‘off’, fuel fills, oil changes etc. all logged, doing the square thing by the machinery becomes simple. No guesswork or peering at tiny numbers in an ‘engine hours’ gauge that nobody’s ever checked for accuracy. As to fuel consumption, we all should have a fair idea of how many litres we burn in an hour. Given that, the log book and starting from ‘full’, we hardly need a gauge at all. Come to think of it, a dipstick has a lot going for it!