After priming it endlessly, she finally started up, and purred nicely. I was going to let it run for a bit to warm up before doing an oil change. After about 15min it started stuttering and tons of white smoke exhausted, I shut it down and checked the racor, FULL of murky nastiness. Was it water? Or just super dirty fuel? I drained it and reprimed it, filled with murky nastiness again, drained and reprimed 2 more times and finally clean looking, but I could actually see little "bubbles" of water coming out of the seperator as I primed it. In all I pulled about 1/2 liter of water out before it primed clean (and I know full well that there is going to be water below the pickup tube, so there is more in there).
I had my fuel polished and tank cleaned when I replaced the engine 2 years ago, I knew it was sparkling in there (before this winter it was always super clean and never any gunk on filters or water in the racor). So I was perplexed as to where all this water came from, if the tank was taking on bilge water it would also be leaking fuel into the bilge and I would have smelled it long ago. I decided to check the fuel fill, and sure enough, the gasket it was pretty shoddy looking (I had replaced it 5 years ago). My theory on what happened, with the insane amount of snow we had this winter, when the cockpit filled (which it did at least 3 times to the brim), when it began to melt it managed to slowly seep into the fuel fill, since snow was blocking up the cockpit drains it probably allowed a tremendous amount more in then even a huge downpour or entire cockpit pooping would.
So two lessons learned, check the fuel fill gasket at least yearly, and be better about shoveling snow out of the cockpit (if not covered). I have always hated the location of the fuel fill, I hate it even more now.
Now I need to polish the fuel again, even though its running clean now in the slip, I know once underway and the tank gets mixed up, that standing water on the bottom is going to get sucked right up.
I am assuming, hopefully some of you more wrench monkey oriented people out there can reassure me, that since I drained all the water out that I could and kept doing it till it ran clean with no water coming through the racor, that I did no damage to my engine since water in theory never actually got to sit in the engine for more then an hour.
Sometimes I want to beat people who use the quote "There is nothing so fun as messing about on boats".
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)