maintenance and old bugaboos

Kerm here,
The 'Belle' is running the best of the trip and I continue to fix or modify things to move us ahead.  Found another source of oil leaking the other day.  A missing o-ring on the oil fill for the injector unit.  I thought it was coming from a shaft seals but alas, missing o-ring. Yea.  Another one down.

I believe that all the putzing is helping in decreasing the oil consumption and increasing the fuel mileage.  I am surprised that changing the oil from a straight grade that the Lehman guru told us to use to a multi has made such a difference in oil comsumption but I guess that technology may have passed by the guru.  It's like our race cars, the new multigrade oils are way, way better.
From the beginning we had a very small diesel fuel leak.  Most people probably wouldn't notice but it was driving me crazy.  The diesel thing has me mystified so we had a service guy replace it.  The seal was different than the original so am glad we had a service guy install it and now I know how to do it. 
I installed a halon system in the engine room while we were at Dog River but need to add to it with a diesel shut down system but will do it when we get to Pasadena Marina in St. Petersburg. 

The black specks in the fuel are probably at the lowest level observed on our trip.  Still drives me nuts but as long as they are less, I'm OK.  A marina guy told me to use LESS algae additive as we are probably cleaning 25 years of algae from the walls of the tank so that is what I'm doing.

Also, the service guy in Dog River told me to stop babying the engine and crank it up a bit.  I don't know,  all diesels sound like they are coming apart even when they idle.  I've been trying,  perhaps I should add more sound deadening.

Tomorrow we head to Clarabelle and do the crossing to Hudson or St. Pete later in the week.  A 18 hour crossing and we will see the fruits of our labor.  I am confident that the 'Belle' will not let us down. 

AND THEN WE CROSS OUR WAKE.