Spring Recommissioning: Getting Your Boat Back on the Water After Winter

The winter layup guide ends with a checklist. This is the other half: what actually happens on the first run of the season, in the order it happens, and what each thing the boat does is telling you. Because the first trip after five months on the trailer is not a normal trip. It is a test, and the boat will hand you the results one symptom at a time.

Do the ground work in the driveway

Everything you can check dry, check dry. The ramp is the worst place in South Australia to discover a problem, and on the first warm Saturday of spring the queue behind you agrees.

• Batteries under load, not at rest. A battery that reads 12.6 volts sitting still can still collapse the moment the starter asks it for two hundred amps. Crank it, or have it load tested. If it was tired in autumn, it is worse now — our guide to choosing a marine battery covers the replacement.
• Fuel. Smell it. Petrol that has sat since April smells flat and varnishy rather than sharp, and that is the smell of a carburettor about to gum up. If the tank was not stabilised before storage, the safest move is fresh fuel and a new filter before the engine ever sees the old stuff.
• Every hose, every clamp. Squeeze the fuel line, the primer bulb and the cooling hoses. Rubber that has taken a set over winter cracks when it is flexed for the first time, and it is better that it cracks in your hand than under way.
• The trailer. Bearings, lights, winch strap, tyre pressures. The boat cannot fail on the water if it never gets there, and the tow is where a lot of spring trips end — see our guides on trailer bearings and trailer brakes.

The first start

Run it on muffs or in a drum before it goes anywhere near the ramp. The first thirty seconds tell you most of what you need to know.

It cranks but will not fire. Nine times out of ten this is fuel: stale, or not reaching the engine because a primer bulb has perished or a fuel pump diaphragm has hardened. Squeeze the bulb and watch whether it firms up. If it does not, air is getting in somewhere between the tank and the engine.

It fires and dies. The float bowl had enough fuel for a few seconds and the supply behind it is not keeping up. Same suspects, plus a blocked filter, plus — on carburettor engines — a main jet gummed by varnish.

It runs but no water comes out the tell-tale. Shut it down. Now. An impeller that sat bent in its housing all winter can shred in the first minute, and an outboard will cook itself in about the time it takes to read this paragraph. The reasoning is in our guide to when to replace an impeller; the short version is that if you do not know its age, replace it before the season rather than after the overheat.

It runs rough, then cleans up. Usually normal. Old fuel in the lines burning off, a plug or two damp from condensation. Give it a few minutes. If it does not clean up, or it cleans up and then goes rough again under load, the plugs want a look — the electrode tells you a great deal about what has been happening in that cylinder.

The first run

Once it is in the water, resist the urge to open it straight up. Idle away from the ramp and watch three things: the temperature gauge or warning light, the tell-tale, and the oil pressure if you have a gauge. Then bring the revs up in stages and listen. A vibration that was not there last season is a propeller that got knocked on the trailer or a gearbox that took on water. Steering that is stiffer than you remember is a cable that has corroded in its outer over winter. A drive that clunks into gear harder than it used to is worth a conversation before it is a bigger one.

Keep the first trip short and close. Not because anything is likely to go wrong, but because if something does, you want to be twenty minutes from the ramp rather than two hours.

What goes wrong most, in our experience

Every September the same handful of jobs come through the Kadina workshop in the same order: flat batteries, then fuel problems, then impellers, then a long tail of things that were on the way out in autumn and finished the job over winter — bellows, trim pumps, corroded connectors. Almost none of it is a surprise to the boat. The owners who get through spring without a tow are the ones who did the driveway checks in August.

If you would rather have all of it looked at in one go, a pre-season service across outboards and sterndrives is exactly what our outboard servicing and repairs work is built around, and it is a far better use of a weekday than the ramp is of a Saturday. Ring 0412 532 984 and get it in before the queue forms.