The following post was originally posted on March 30. Somehow, I deleted it a week or two later and have had to reconstruct it.

March 30, 2103.

Since my last post, there was a discussion of my outboard issues on a Catalina 22 forum on Yahoo.com. One post to the forum described a cleaning process using a product called SeaFoam. (Thanks, Don. By the way, great name!) It involved dumping a bottle of SeaFoam and a treatment of Sta-Bil in a 3-gallon fuel tank full of high octane, no-ethanol gasoline, then running that mixture through the engine for several hours. The idea is to give the mixture time to dissolve and burn off the accumulated varnish, sludge and other crud from the fuel system and carburetor.

You may recall that the issue with my outboard was its refusal to start, so my concern was whether I would be able to get the engine started at all. As I thought about it, and read the various suggestions for getting the engine to start reliably, a thought occurred to me. The ideas all dealt with using the external gas tank. But the 4hp Mercury/Nissan/Tohatsu is kind of unique in that it has both an external gas connector and an internal tank. I was using the internal tank, which is gravity fed. But the tank is only a couple of inches above the carb. That's not much gravity-induced pressure to move the gas. So when I hooked up the external tank, I did everything just short of standing on the pump bulb. Gas was going to get to the carb, by golly!! Sure enough, the engine fired with the first pull of the starter. It ran beautifully.

Another point: I have often heard from experienced sailors that you shut down the engine by disconnecting the fuel and letting the engine run until it runs out of gas. But a call to the local Tohatsu dealer brought a different response.

The lady I spoke to said you should only run a small 4-cycle dry at the end of the season, before long-term storage. She said to always use 100% gas, never any with ethanol, and add Sta-Bil. Turn off the engine by pulling the kill switch. The lack of ethanol and the added Sta-Bil keeps the gas from gumming up your carb. She explained that the small fuel pumps often have problems clearing air from the lines when you try to start the engine after running it dry. I guess that's why the company doesn't recommend it.

I let it run for about an hour and a half before I had to head for home. The recommendation was to run it for 3 hours, but I was out of daylight and needed to get home.  I killed the engine with the kill switch. I'll try starting it this weekend and see what happens.