By Rich
Since our new baby has not been sailed a ton lately I decided to fly down a week or two before our planned delivery from Charleston to Annapolis. The first thing I wanted to do was change the fuel filters and polish the fuel by running it through the Racors from one tank to another. So far I’m finding about what I expected to since the fuel is a year old!
(Below) Ummmm yeah time to replace:
As polishing has started I’ve quickly found growth stirred up in the Racor bowl and I’m endeavoring to flush it out. It was so bad it clogged the quarter inch drain bolt hole! Very glad we checked this before going out into the ocean…..
After 4-5 bowls of flushing it’s looking better:
Now the question is how many of these am I going to cook while polishing today!
Rover's Blog 
Wow that sure was well worth checking!
Well done. We did not do that when we bought Calliope. We had similar issues. Fuel had been sitting for about a year and a half. I did not know enough at the time to check this. We were running 30 micron filters and the gunk all went into the secondary filter on the diesel. Clogged it all up. We ended up, as you will recall, having to do maintenance on the diesel to ensure we cleaned that up and then polished the fuel dockside. We switched to 5 micron filters for about a month and have been using 10 micron since. We are just getting it under control this year. Been using biocide as well when we fill up. We have no access to clean the fuel tank. If you have access on the fuel tank you might want to consider doing a full clean up when you are back in Annapolis. Unless you kill the critters or clean them out they will keep coming back
Agree Glenn! The two starboard tanks definitely have gunk that I will have to manually clean out back in Annapolis. Fortunately there is a large enough inspection port that I can remove to get access!