I was in a rush this year to get my boat in the water. My small boat that is. I had an apointment to go sailing with a group so I did not want to let them down. With my bigger boat I had encountered a lot of problems with the renewal of the deck surface so at this point I was happy to have another.

After a bit of a sprint to finish some varnishing it wat time to put her back in to the water.

I took the outboard engine from my living room, hung it on the boat, boat in the crane, in to the water, start the engine, moor the boat, WOOOO! not this time...

I pulled and pulled and pulled, pulled some more, kept pulling and pulling. Nothing. When the crane guy got inpatient I pulled the boat to the side, moored it there an pulled the starter for a while

Nothing.

As a am an accomplished mechanic [not] I methodically examined every part of the system. I mean, I started gathering info on what it could be. Someone sugested water in the tank. I had not topped the fuel up this winter as I did not want to invest in a boat that I was going to sell.

There was a HUGE amount of the stuff at the botom of the tank!
I was able to get it out with a piece of pipe and I think it must have been about 100 cc. Small wonder the engine wouldn't run.

After the fuel was clean I thought starting the engine again would be easy. After three consecutive days of very exhausting pulling I gave up and cancelled my participation in the event.

After a few days I went back with new spark plugs. A few sputters showed that things were getting beter. But never would the engine run for more than a second or so.

I was tired of it and decided that I would let the yards motor guy have a crack at it. But het was not particularly nice and did not have time that day. But he said that the carburator would have to be cleaned.

I thought I could try it myself. No adventure is to great for an accomplished mechanic!

As it turned out, it was more work to get the engine of the boat and fit it again, than it was to clean the carburator. No smal part of this was due the fact that I dropped the engine lock in the water during remounting...

But the carburator was very dirty! I almost heard the dirt dropping on the worktop as I cleanded the nozzle. This amount of dirt makes cleaning easy...

After reconnecting the engine it came to life quite quickly and after a bit of tuning it ran like a dream! It even seems to run better than before. What a lovely result after so much work.