Darned old boats!

Yesterday I tried the engine on my boat again. She just won’t run. Mercury engines, especially an older one like mine, are known to be hard to get running if they sat for a while. Well, I can get her to start after a while, but it dies soon after. Sounds like a fuel problem, right?

Since it seems to get gas for a while, there must be a restriction or something between the engine and the tank. The primer bulb and the hose to the engine seem okay and are just a year old…not likely suspects. The fuel filter as my next likely suspect. I slipped on my filter wrench for tight spaces like this and pulled…and pulled, and pulled. At last I got the filter to budge I tiny bit when I heard the sound of a suction being broken. I’m pretty sure the filter element was clogged, or the filter housing, because it was trying to draw fuel from the filter, and had plenty of suction to that point, but the tank had no suction at all. So, I get my new filter, but its pretty big and I go to my gas can to put some gas into it so it won’t draw so much air through it, and…the gas can is empty. Last year, I remember cranking and pumping, cranking and pumping to get gas from the tank through an empty filter and fuel line before it could start.

But not today. The sun has set, it’s getting really dark and the forecast is for freezing rain for the next 24 hours.

The joys of older boats!