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| Filler up? |
I promised you a blog posting on refueling in Guyana. We found it interesting enough during our visit there that it needs its own posting.
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| See the fuel tanks.....er....barrels? |
The standard gas tank for the river pirogues is a 40'ish gallon
plastic barrel. Some of the river
pirogues have two of these. Others use 5
gallon jugs similar to those that hold cooking oil for restaurants – in fact, I believe some of these jugs actually started out as cooking oil containers that
then got turned into fuel jugs.
More often than not, the fuel hose simply runs from the open fill
hole in the top of the jug to the two stroke Yamaha outboard. Sometimes refueling takes place after the
trip. Once we reached Rockstone, our
river guide Paul refilled his 40 gallon barrel from a smaller jug. Other times, the refueling takes place mid
journey like on our trip from Bartika to Parika. Felix slowed to idle and then switched the
fuel hose from one barrel to another and we were off again zooming down the
river. I looked back again to see him
use his toes to grip the hose and shove it further down into the barrel all
while driving from his standing position out the top of the pirogue.
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| Fuel barrel with hose straight to outboard |
When we stopped for gas on the way to Marshall Falls I
didn’t really notice the procedure. The
next day, we got a front row seat of the refueling process when we went to the
Quarry Falls.
In Bartica, the fuel stations are about 20 ft above the river on
stilts. One of the boat guys climbed up
the wooden structure to the fueling platform. The driver handed up money via a
bucket on a rope. Then another bucket on
a rope was lowered down. This contained
the oil for the fuel mix. This was
dumped in the barrel via a large funnel.
Then the long hose with the fuel was handed down. Gravity let the fuel flow.
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| Fuel dock in Bartica |
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| Oil for fuel mix |
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| Fuel / petrol |
Pumps to dispense the fuel seem to be sparse. More than once we saw gravity being
used. At the Itaballi ferry crossing,
cars were being filled by putting the jerry jug on the roof of the car. When captain Jim took his jerry jugs to the
gas/petrol station on the main street in Bartica, the same thing happened, it was
filled by gravity with a little help from a guy that sucked on the end of the
hose to get it going. Think about
that……this is a standard method for refueling!
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| Gravity fill |
On our driving trip into the bush and Iwaorama, we stopped at two fuel
stations and they had gas pumps like we are used to in the
USA. However, on the trip back our
driver Mark stopped on the side of the road to refuel from the 3 jerry jugs on
the roof rack and he used a special hose with a shaker thing to get the fuel
flowing. Gravity took care of the
rest.
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| Another gravity fill |
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| Another fuel dock in Bartica - LOW tide - vessel to the left is a fuel transport boat |
On one of our provision runs to Bartica, we also got gas for our outboard. We dinghied around to one of the fueling stations. It was low tide so we had to lift the outboard up and row in the last little bit. There were many others fueling up so we had to wait, which was fine because it gave us a front row seat to the process and all the boats filling up with interesting cargo and characters. One long river pirogue had at least twelve of the 40 gallon barrels they were filling up. Then a dock hand waded out with a big bundle on his shoulder and put that sack in the front of the river pirogue. When he passed by again with another bundle, I realized it was a whole leg of beef. He heaved that one in the boat as well. I asked the driver of the river pirogue where they were headed
"Up river, into the interior to one of the mining camps." Okay.
"Beef. It's what's for dinner."
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| "Would you like fries with your leg of beef?" |
