If you have spent any time on the water at all, you have probably had an encounter or two with an unruly outboard motor. I have had way more than my share. Someone else take some of this burden! It’s not like Ive even had them for a long time and neglected the maintaining. I would EXPECT it if that were the case. Ugh. Ok this outboard problem is probably my fault. I made a decision that Im starting to regret. When I purchased S/V Integrity I went looking for an inflatable dingy. I found on FB marketplace for a good price and I bought it. No outboard.

Ok so I have to backup. When i purchased my trimaran for the Everglades Challenge I purchased a Torqueedo electric outboard and it has been AMAZING. No issues other than my own pushing too hard and running on 1% battery… but that’s another story.

I found the dingy on FB marketplace and I took it to a local lake in NH and tested it out with the Torqueedo. Worked amazing. My plan was to bring this setup to Florida when I picked up S/V Integrity. If you look closely in this picture… you can see that it’s not an inflatable dingy and it a gas Honda outboard on this dingy… hmmmmm

Well as the day of launching S/V Integrity grew closer I was thinking about the 3 day drive that I was about to sign up to take from NH to FL with a dingy, outboard, lots of extra stuff…. And it seemed like a LOT of logistics for a boat I had not even really been on yet since purchase. I made a decision to buy a used dingy already in FL and once I got to FL I ran around for a few days getting everything that I WAS going to bring with me on the drive, but now I have 2 of everything right? RIGHT?!

So this Honda was a FB marketplace purchase in FL. It looked great. No dings, no issues that I could see. No leaks. It started right up and ran in the sellers driveway. UGH. Why do I do this to myself to save $1000. In this photo I was off to the mooring ball and my first action after tying up for the night was to jump in the dingy and go get dinner. Thats the dream right?

Well the outboard started right up. I was amazed. Off I go to dinner. No issues. I made it about a mile to where the dingy dock is and tied up. Had a lovely dinner of sweet potato fries and sliders. YUM! I walked back to the dingy parking and the motor fired right up. I was thinking about how much money I saved and just how this was working out great!!!

Oh how wrong I was! On the way to the boat, the motor raved WAY WAY up… hmm. Weird. Ok I throttled way down and took it slow… let’s see what’s up with that… Then suddenly NOTHING. Clunk. Dang. Pull, nothing. Again, nothing… ok so Now Im half a mile from the boat and the outboard is dead. So THIS what I was looking forward to all these months waiting to get sailing?

I wont bore you with how to tear apart a carb, there’s lots of YouTube that can help with that problem. So I spent the afternoon into the dusk of the setting Florida sun leaning over the edge of the dingy trying to diagnose the issue. Pulling the float cover off the carb, trying to drain fuel, looking at the spark plug, etc.

While I was doing all this unexpected “Boat Yoga” and the worst kind… I had this very small screw that I just couldn’t get started. It was up behind the carb and I was struggling to get it started and so worried about dropping it and then it would be over… or sacrificed to Poseidon. So I came up with this quick solution. Maybe other people have accomplished this in similar way, but I wanted to share in case some random person runs into this and needs to solve the same problem.

In this picture you can see a small segment of hose and a bent wire along with the screw. I used the bent wire to hold the screw, and the head of the screw shoved into the hose, let me get enough grip on it to start to thread it into the hole way back up in the back of the carb. It’s one of these screws that just should be taken out when the carb is off, but we were WAY past that point.

Here’s a video this technique in action. I had gotten the screw all the way in and then realized that I wanted to take a video. So I back it out and then back in. You can see that it turns in and lets me get the clearance that I needed to get a very very small 90 degree screw driver in there. I will definitely keep that trick in my back pocket in the case that I need to do this again. I suspect that now that Im a boat owner, or more accurately a boat repairer that I will use this trick more than I would like.