Memorial Day

Took her out with the familly for the first time. Of course everything worked great !! NOT. The tilt would not come up at the first beach. After a couple of tries I just heard the motor running. Oh well, we still had a good time. Did some tubing behind and all ran good. Little challenging getting on to the trailer. Got to get some side rails to take care of cross winds and not put the trailer in so deep. We were doing some swimming so I snapped a couple of photos with her on the beach. Even beached, the lower unit was still just clear of the bottom.

So got home and pulled apart the tilt mechanisim. Discovered that the tilt worm shaft is broken. BTW, if you need parts for the OMC Stringer Stern drives you have to check out Crowley Marine. They have online diagrams and access to Bombardie's catalog for factory support.

5-10-2009 Lots of Flooding

Took her to the lake today for its second outing. Grey overcast and lots of rain for the past two weeks. I knew water would be high and it looked like the day might be scrubbed due to rain. Got to the New Manford ramp and the ramp was under water, gone !!!! if you look at the pictures from April of the boat in the water that is the New Manford dock. The dock was still floating, but the ramp going to it just disappeared in to the water. There was no room at the top of the ramp to even line the rig up and back into the water. As I could not identify the ramp area we decided it was not worth risking it.

Drove over to Pier 51 area. The water was very high on the ramp, however, the ramp was still there. Decided to give it a try. No problem launching. Beached the boat as the docks were also under water there as well. First time I have run the boat with the lower unit tilted. The OMC book says that you can do this at low power settings for short periods of time during loading / unloading. It seemed to work just fine. Steering gets very vague but that is to be expected. It allowed me to bring her right on to the shore as well as back her of the shore and keep the prop out of the mud.

The GARMIN 178C installed easy enough. Today was the first opportunity to take it out and try it. As expected the GPS ran flawless. However, the depth finder did not run at all !!!! Well, not exactly right it said it was intermittently 200 ft off the end of the ramp. Thats not right. The rain started so I finally packed it in for the day as the water was to cold to get out and play with the transducer.

The boat ran great. Engine fired up easily, but the choke is still an issue. Had to pull the flame arrestore and manually close the choke. It started right up when I did that. Think I am going to install a manual option on the choke or maybe adapet and outboard electric solenoid to actuate the choke instead of relying on the spring.

Once I got home with the boat I filled up a kitchen trash can with water and put the transducer for the sonar into it. Well it worked just fine in the trash correctly reporting about 2ft of water. However, it only did this after I found the reset all button, so I am thinking that some setting had gotten messed up at some point. Remounted the transducer. Hopefully it will work next time out.