[ndutton]

I had an unexpected shutdown (aren't they ALL unexpected?) a week and a half ago. I left on a 40 mile journey (round trip) and as we departed about ¼ mile from my slip the engine faltered, faltered again and died. At the first falter my eye went immediately to the EWDS light display and stayed there through the second falter and shut down. The first parameter to alarm was the raw water flow after it quit (as it should have).

I immediately turned the ignition off for the protection of the coil and raised sail to maintain steering. With everything safe I could get down to business. What I knew thanks to the EWDS was I had sufficient fuel pressure and sufficient voltage to the coil. I thought about it for about a minute, especially my last refueling a few nights earlier. When I opened the fill plate to the main tank the O ring broke. Of course I didn't have a replacement (I do now), rain was forecast later that night and of course Catalina put the fuel fill plate right where water puddles on the deck. As a jury rig stopgap measure I wrapped teflon tape around the threads and tightened the fill cap. This episode led me to suspect the shutdown was due to water in the fuel tank.

I switched the tank selector valve to my secondary tank (why doesn't everybody have a second tank?), purged the lines with my electric fuel pump via the fuel polishing switch (why doesn't everybody have that too?) and tried to restart the engine. It popped and coughed telling me there was spark. I closed the raw water intake valve to avoid overfilling the waterlift and went back to starting but feathering the choke this time. After a few more coughs she fired up. I shut her down and reopened the raw water valve, restarted her and ran maybe three ½ mile laps inside outer Los Angeles Harbor as a test run. All good.

I motored over to the fuel dock, put more than enough additional fuel in the secondary tank for our planned journey and back if we had to motor the entire way and off we went. Since then I've had at least 4 hours of trouble free motoring, returned to my home slip a few days ago.

My hypothesis based on all the above: probably water in the fuel but I needed to know for sure.

I have since emptied 5 of the 12 gallons from the main tank, poured them into a 5 gallon drinking water bottle and inspected the contents. The attached picture tells the story. Next up I'll draw another 5 gallons from the tank and inspect again hoping to see no more water confirming that it was all drawn out with the first 5 gallons. I'll finish with the final 2 gallons as a double check. I was pleased to see no debris or other assorted nastiness in the fuel, just pure water.

I rebuilt the carburetor earlier today on principle. It had enough water through it to shut the engine down so opening it up was prudent. All clean inside. Following the expected successful fuel inspections I'll replace the filter.

The EWDS provided invaluable information right at the hit and saved me a ton of testing. The entire episode took maybe 5 minutes from initial failure to a running engine.