The boat is still in the yard…awaiting completion of painting projects as well as the departure of a family of young starlings that began life in my radar reflector at the top of my (horizontal) mast…I definitely have to cover the access hole in the ‘bottom’ before next year. Also, planting the garden has had an urgency with the very short season we have here.
Along the way I dropped off my outboard motor, an elderly 9.9 horsepower 2-stroke with an extra long shaft, on the doorstep of my machinist friend, Graham Jones in Brooklyn. He rebuilt part of the boat trailer last year and I wanted to have him tell me if the rotational play in the propeller was a sign of lower-unit gear wear (it wasn’t). While the motor was there I had the ‘brilliant’ idea to have him link in a remote throttle and gear shift. I don’t know the outcome of all this yet, but I fear for the declining health of the elderly motor. The lower housing split out one winter…best guess is that water got trapped down there by blocked intake screens and the winter freeze expanded it to break out the aluminum housing. It didn’t affect the oil reservoir and I filled the crack with thickened Epoxy, which seemed to fix it…and it has worked fine for two seasons.
My big fear is loss of reliability…true, the motor has always started by the third pull and has never given the slightest evidence of coming trouble, but in the background of my mind still hovers the fear of complete and sudden failure, leaving me to run the boat entirely by sail. Admittedly sail-alone is a very seamanly thing to do, but experience has shown me situations where the wind and tide are against you and there is little room to tack…moments to swallow pride and turn on the ‘iron sail’ as I think it is called. Efforts to come aside the wharf or pick up a mooring by sail alone have not been pretty to see, especially single-handed.
So just for information purposes I began a search on EBay for a replacement motor. New ones (extra long shaft, 4-stroke, 9.9) cost upwards of $2500, so I looked to see if old ones like mine show up for sale. I found a few currently bid at a few hundred dollars, but I have developed this doubt about prices on EBay–any time I have found an attractive price for something I want and placed a bid, the price seems to have kept on mysteriously and immediately jumping up. Either there is a concealed reserve bid mechanism or someone else has an automatic price raising tool until the price gets to a limit they have set; after all, why bid higher than necessary to get the object? All I know is the price keeps on being just above my bid to the point where I don’t want to pay the price of finding out how high it would go; at the end the bid stops a price that is higher than retail list price. Every time a price looks too good to be true, it is. All that is to say there is an illusion of low-priced used motors out there, but I cannot attest to the reality.