Yesterday morning after breakfast, I wanted to go on land with long list of to-dos.

But, there’s always a BUT.

When I started the outboard motor it didn’t run smoothly and stopped pretty quickly. With all tricks it didn’t run as it is supposed to do.

I opened the motor and checked fuel after the filter. There was plenty coming out. Thus I concluded the culprit is the carburetor or more precisely dirty fuel. Although I’m using an original Tohatsu fuel filter, I observed over a long period that there is still enough dirt getting into the carburetor.

Cleaning the carburetor on the tender was too dangerous. The swell was around half a meter. Thus, I needed to get the outboard motor into MaRe’s cockpit. Easy to say so but the swell hampers this work as well.

For attaching/detaching the motor to/from the tender, I have a motor bridle. This, I hook into to line to move pull the tender up the davits, which gives me kind of a crane. I removed enough slack in the line that the motor will not be in the water when removed from the tender. When the motor hang on the hook still partially in the water I rushed on MaRe and lifted the motor high enough out of the water. Next, I needed to get it on the lower part of stern about 1 1/2 m horizontally from the hanging position. There is one moment where I have to hold the 25 kg motor in one hand and lower the line with the other hand while the line is around a cleat. And this all on a boat in a swell of around half a meter. In such moments I’m additionally happy I have a cat. With enough slack in the line I unhooked the motor, still standing on the lowest part of the stern with the motor only in my hand and MaRe swinging in the swell. I got the motor up the stairs and attached it to it’s holder in the cockpit.

First, I had to clean some sand, which got under the motor cover when a few weeks ago a surf rolled over the tender at the beach. Detergent and water was the best. Then this was done.

As I have to clean the carburetor about every 3 month, I got routine. Opening the carburetor I found again plenty of very small particles on the carburetor’s bottom part, which passed the filter but clogged the fuel flow in the carburetor. I cleaned all little “canals” in the carburetor as well. After assembling all again I did some maintenance greasing as well. As expected the motor started well and kept running. I had to stop it after a few seconds because there was cooling water. After letting the motor cool down again the second test was successful again. A third test again was successful.

Then I needed to get motor back on the tender. For that I needed to adjust the position of the tender on the water twice to have it low enough to unhook it when it’s over the tender and high enough to not get it washed by a wave.

Finally it was attached to the tender again. Now, the final long motor test. The motor works again as I’m used too.

Looking at my watch I saw it was too late to go on land and do all the errands I wanted to do.

I decided to do a few boat jobs, one of them, this week’s cleaning of the cockpit, and do the errands next day.

Thus, I have to get up now, and do what I wanted to do yesterday.