It can't be February.... but it truly is...

Wednesday, February 1, 2012


Well Eric came by and we told him our motor woes…
He said to bring it up and he’d look at it for us. After taking it apart and examining it, cleaning it up it looks like we have a crack in the metal of the carb. Sigh… He said to let him see what he could do, and asked why we didn’t bring it to him to begin with? Mhmmmm… I was thinking that we probably should have brought the generator there too, but that’s water under the bridge… At this point if we can get the motor working it would be wonderful. Wayne’s thinking of maybe just getting another motor and taking this one home to work on next summer if Eric can’t get it running. I got a lesson on how to take a carburetor apart (Get outta my way Pat, Get outta my way LOL) and guess I probably got under foot watching what Eric was doing, but I’d never seen one taken apart and was interested in what he was doing. Poor Eric had an audience of me, Wayne, Klaus and Barbara. I’m thinking I might take a small engine class this summer when I get home.

We bit the bullet and went to Dicks to see what this Colman Outboard motor looks like.

On the way there, somehow the Google directions said portions of the road were “toll roads”.
Okay that was fine.
Those are the ones I think we throw the coins in or get a ticket with the rates on it.
The road we were on directed us to 2 options only. North or South and both were something called Sun Coast passes or something like that.
Didn’t know what that meant but we couldn’t exactly turn around at a V in the road with cars behind us so continued on waiting to see what that was about… Never did see any coin toss bins but in getting off at our designated exit there were booths with that Sun Coast emblem on them. People were driving through. We stopped to get a ticket or to find out what was going on…
Oh oh…
I guess you buy passes or something ahead of time to use these toll roads.
We told the lady, that there was no option where we got on, to back out or buy a ticket and we ended up getting quite a scowl and lecture from her.
People were honking at us from behind.
She said something about we’d get a $100 fine in the mail probably and she’d have to charge us $12 because we didn’t have the pass.
Holy cow!
That was the full day price or something. $12 for a 7-8 mile stretch of road we used and $100 fine waiting for me when we got home???
When I start adding up the money we’ve spent so far this winter it may have been a lot cheaper to stay home and pay the heating bills (but hey we wouldn’t be having this lovely adventure in life now would we). One more expense…

We finally got to Dicks and it’s a pretty good size sporting goods store. We were looking over the Colman outboard floor model. It looked pretty sturdy. We just couldn’t get the motor cover off to look at the engine though. We finally got the guy that works in that department to help us out only to be told that it was only a display model. There was no motor under the hood…oops. The lid was firmly glued to the body so I guess that made sense why we couldn’t get the lid off to look at the little motor.
After our “duhhhhhh” moment, we asked if we could take a look at the one they had in stock. Sure. No problem.

Wow… it resembles our little Mercury…
a lot…
I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but the Colman outboard didn’t seem like a little plastic toy that we’d been hearing some jokes about…

At this point, what were our options?
We could try to use our little motor that isn’t working…
try to order a new carburetor – of which 6 are already on backorder from the manufacturer in Wisconsin, with a wait time of about 3-4 weeks…
buy the 8 hp that we couldn’t get started, but AJ did get it started once he got there…
buy a new small Yamaha for a minimum of $2500 or more and travel wayyyyy north to pick it up…
buy a new Mercury at an obscenely expensive price too and wait for delivery…
or buy this little Colman which while an unknown quality (Colman makes camping gear, not motors) was of a moderate price, but if things went wrong, where do you get parts for it?

After I thought about it, we’d been having problems getting parts for our little Mercury too.
So, we bought the little Colman, loaded it into the jeep after moving things around to make room for it (we have the fold up ladder, box that the windlass came in with parts and tools, crates, tools, and a sundry of items from the boat).

What a week it’s been and I can’t believe that we’re into February now too. This is starting to feel like the Hotel California LOL “you can check out any time you want but you can never leave”. I’ve stopped saying we’ll check out tomorrow… I think we’re here for the duration.

Now where are those Marina Stock papers…