Click and Clack Question: Where Did the Oil Go?

So we anchored out one night and ran the generator to cook dinner - no problem. The next morning, we started the generator up and after about 20 seconds it quit. Pushed the reset button, started it again and as before it quit after running 20 seconds. Got out the book and following the troubleshooting, checked the oil level. NO OIL! Ok - well the oil had been changed last fall and we hadn't checked it this spring before leaving (dumb thing to skip ...) but thought we must be burning it up as the generator smokes for a short period of time after startup. It was as good of a reason as we could think of! So we added 3 quarts of 30W oil and were good to go with the generator running great for the 1/2 hour to cook dinner. Stopped that evening, started the generator - it ran about 20 seconds and shut off. Guess what? NO OIL - again! So Steve starts looking in the bildge, under the generator - no oil appears to be leaking anywhere. After all 3 (or possibly more) quarts of oil missing somewhere surely can't be hard to find, right? And there is no way anything can burn 3 quarts of oil in 1/2 hour. THE SOLUTION: I said to Steve "check the oil level in the engine - that's where the oil from the generator went". Sure enough - overfilled by about 5 quarts! The solution dawned on me when Steve said something about the valve for the engine drain was open half way. So the set up is like this: to drain the oil from both the generator and the engine with minimal fuss, there is a hose from each drain instead of a plug (like is on your car). These come together with each attaching at the top of a "Y" valve with a drill powered pump on the bottom of the 'Y'. Each line has a valve in it - open if you want to drain the oil and closed if you want to NOT drain the oil. So the generator valve was OPEN and the engine valve was 1/2 OPEN. As the oil pump in the generator built up pressure, the oil was pushed into the engine instead of providing oil pressure in the generator. End result: all of the oil in the generator was pushed into the engine! Who would have thought??? We are much more careful of the valve positions as a result of this experience :-)