Sailing the California Delta

And while this motor will move the Catalina around the marina and actually out onto the delta, I really don't think it has the power to move the boat against a strong wind or current. Well as it turns out the same Harbormaster (shawn) that told me about the Catalina, said he had a line on a Honda 10hp 4 stroke motor, for $600.00 I jumped at the offer, and told him I was definitely interested. Later that week he called me up and told me he had the motor in his shop and that it looked to be in great shape. We made arrangements to meet at the boat on Saturday and I came down, money in hand, I was also going to fix some other little problems that I had found. All of the toggle switches on the original power panel had fallen apart when I tried to use them.
Saturday came and my friend Brian met me at the boat to help me with the electrical, installing switches and troubleshooting the nav lights.

Shawn showed up with the motor, we mounted it on the boat, and fired it up, seemed to run great, $600 changed hands and I now had an older Honda 4stroke 10 horse motor for the boat! Success!

Well things are never that easy for me and boating.... It took Brian and I the rest of the day to work out the lighting issues (still some left), and by the time we were done he had to go. About that time my wife had driven down from Sacramento and I wanted to show off the new boat (she hadn't seen it yet) so I cleaned up the tools, made sure we had a full tank of gas and headed out of the marina to catch the sunset on the San Joaquin river. The motor seemed to run like a champ until the sun had set, then suddenly the "green" oil pressure light started to flicker then died (all in about 3 seconds) before I could reach the motor to shut it off, the engine died. Now this is the California delta in mid November not a breath of wind to be found, the ground tackle was still in the lazerette where the previous owner had left it, it was very dark and there was no one else out on the water. I tried to get the motor running with no luck, once it started but only ran for a few minutes before dying again. Finally I saw a power boat leaving the mouth of our marina harbor and started waving at it with a flashlight. Luckily they spotted us, turns out it was a neighbor of ours from further down the marina, he and his friends were going out for some night fishing. Well we threw him a line and he towed us all of the way back to our slip, probably a 25 minute ride. When we got back we thanked him, offered him money and beer for the tow, both things he declined. Boating people seem to have a great sense of courtesy and charity, they will help out a total stranger and when you offer to reward them they refuse (usually) stating that they know they will need help someday and they are just kind of paying it forward.
So to make a long story longer, I am now out $600.00 and have a dead motor :(

We pack our stuff off of the boat and drive home kind of despondent. The next day I drive down after church and look the motor over, I'm able to get it to run for a very short time if I fiddle with the choke, but not more than that. I decide to pull the motor off of the boat and take it home so that I can work on it in my garage.

Well I get the motor home, and start looking online for help, I don't find much but there was a great marine motor tech site that gave me some areas to look.

Meanwhile I found an identical parts motor on Craigslist for $150.00 but since I had figured that I was probably looking at a dead bad cdi unit which honda no longer makes I figured it was a good deal because I could take the one off of the parts motor.

The holidays came roaring up and I had to sideline the boat projects until last weekend.

I finally took motor A (the $600.00 one) down, pulled the bottom end off and checked the water pump impeller, one of the problems was that after a couple of minutes the motor would stop flowing water. I found that the impeller shaft, and housing were shot,

and I was able to replace them with parts from motor B (the $150.00 one). I also found the rectifier had a broken wire at the box so I pulled the rectifier off of the parts motor. Put everything back together, loaded the motor into my 50 gallon trash can full of water and started it up.

I had purchased a oil pressure test gauge from Harbor Freight for $15.00 and it showed a stead 40 lbs of oil pressure at any speed so it confirmed my suspicions that the oil pressure light problems were electrical in nature and not actually a problem with the engine oil pressure.

Well I put the motor completely back together, put the cover on and let in run in the shop for about 30-45 minutes at different rpm speeds, the motor seemed to run great, nice steady stream of water, it had a rattle but other than that no problems.

Needless to say I wanted to load the motor up in the car, drive down to the catalina, and go boating. But since it was about 8:30 on Sunday evening I didn't.

Monday:
Well I had a very short day and decided that I needed to take the motor down and test it, the advantages to being self employed. I loaded the motor up, drove the 45 minutes to the marina, hooked the outboard onto the Catalina, fired it up - good. I left my little evenrude onboard just in case. Then I headed out to the Delta, outside of the Marina which is on Seven mile slough, I turned southeast upriver toward stockton. The motor ran great, I run under just motor for the next two hours all of the way up past the old river flats and the backside of franks tract, which I'm hoping to sail on next summer.

I was also able to calibrate my knotmeter to my GPS turns out it was reading almost 2 knots slow, this is probably because of the excessive growth on the underside of the boat, something I hope to deal with in the early spring.

Well so the details are:

Used Honda motor $600.00
Used Honda Parts Motor $150.00
Honda Shop Manual $10.00
Oil Pressure Test gauge $10.00
Refund on original motor -$100.00

Total cost of 4 stroke (tahoe legal) 9.9 hp motor $670.00! I think I can live with that.

More on my boating adventures later.

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