How to winterize a boat and outboard motor
(Neil, Yukon)
Winter comes quickly on the Yukon River. One day the channel is clear and the next morning it's running with pans of ice. Before that happens you need to get your boat out of the water and high up, away from the banks of the river. Otherwise it will be locked in by the winter ice, swept away by the spring break up and spat out anywhere between here and the Bering Sea.
Unplugging the pee-hole
Even before you get the boat out of the water you may be trying to run it when temperatures fall below freezing. This can mean that the 'pee-hole' where the water for cooling the motor comes out gets blocked with a plug of ice. You can't run the motor for long if it's blocked as the motor will overheat.
One cold morning we started the motor and no water came from the pee-hole. Solution - run the engine for a couple of minutes to heat up, then shut it off and wait for the heat to melt the ice plug. Also, pouring hot water from a Thermos on the hole will help. (Or you could pee on it yourself.) You may have to repeat this process a few times. Make sure you have the intake in the water, of course as if you don’t you can strain the impeller (the little pump that draws the cooling water in and around the engine).
Motor up or down?
The Yukon River water stays warmer than the air when it starts to get cold, particularly overnight. Some people leave their lower unit down in the water so it doesn’t freeze. We did this for a while but when the temperatures really start falling you run the danger of water freezing in your cooling system or around the impeller and that can do damage. When it got below about -10C at night we lifted the lower unit out of the water and only put it back down to start it, ideally when the sun had been shining on the motor for a while.
Heavy duty hauling
The river drops a few inches every day in the autumn as the temperature falls and so the height and distance you have to haul your boat steadily increases. We had about 60' of silty, gently sloping beach followed by another 60' of steep brush-covered river bank to haul our boat over.
Our boat isn't particularly heavy but our 40hp Yamaha outboard motor weighs a ton, well 223lbs / 101kg.
Luckily, a friend had loaned us his chain hoist which had a 10' pull. We anchored the hoist to a spruce tree and then cobbled together lengths of assorted chain and rope to connect the boat to the hoist. Then I started hauling...
A chain hoist does work but it’s not the best thing as it’s really designed to lift heavy weights directly up and down, not laterally. Some people have motorised winches which are expensive but very efficient.
Others just use come-alongs (hand winches) though these can be flimsy and fiddly, and often have a very short length of pull so you constantly have to keep resetting.
A friend has just told us about a ‘rope-along’ which is a kind of hand winch that you can run any piece of rope through. It sounds as though it could be ideal for us but we haven’t tried it yet.
A couple of lessons we learned
Use chain for the pulling or at least rope that doesn't stretch too much. On our first pulls I spent 2-3 feet just pulling out the slack in the rope. Also, if you're using chain, don't buy hugely sturdy chain like we did. It's very heavy and difficult to work with and you're hauling all that extra weight.
Using come-alongs even with a short length of pull can help to take out the slack in the line before you start hauling on the hoist. As ever in the bush, you have to make whatever you’ve got work as you don’t often have the ideal equipment for every job.
Winterising the motor
You’ve got your boat safely out of the water. Now to flush out the water cooling system. Many helpful YouTube videos cheerfully show you hooking your motor up to a hosepipe and letting it run. We don't have hosepipes or any water pressure. We do have plenty of water (there's a creek about 100 yards from where we're hauling the boat out). If we had a water pump and 100 yards of hose...But we have to haul buckets by hand.
We then positioned the outboard down into one of our largest totes (plastic storage bins) - it only just fitted after removing the propeller - so we could run it in clean creek water. Yukon River water is full of fine glacial silt we wanted to wash out of the cooling system. We stood beside the tote for 15 minutes topping it up with buckets of water. How time flies when you're having fun....
Changing the engine oil
So, you've flushed the cooling system and the motor's nice and warm. Time to change the engine oil. Remove the filler cap, undo the drain screw and catch the oil in a container. We bought an official Yamalube kit. Plenty of oil, a pair of disposable gloves, a spare gasket for the oil drain screw and a keyring(?). The only thing is, the oil comes in 946ml opaque bottles and you need to measure out 440ml. We don't have graduated beakers here, so guesswork it is.
Now to change the oil filter. Fiddly things to get off. I had bought a cuplike attachment for our ratchet that exactly fitted the oil filter. Except that it didn't work, it just kept slipping. We couldn’t get an adjustable strap wrench. Don’t buy the cuplike one, they’re useless. So I punched a large nail through the old filter at a careful angle to avoid damaging anything around it in the engine and screwed it off that way. I screwed the new one on wearing a pair of bright orange washing up gloves for extra grip - don't tell anyone.
Changing the gear oil / Running the gas out
Next, drain the gear oil. That's the oil that lubricates the lower unit where the power is transmitted to the propeller. Get the engine running to warm up the gear oil. We put fuel stabiliser into the gas tank earlier and we now ran the engine out of gas at the same time. There will always be a bit of fuel left in the engine and the stabiliser stops it from reacting with the air over time and possibly corroding the engine.
To change the gear oil, open the top screw first - we needed a very wide flat-headed screwdriver. Check which size you need before you’re 60 miles from a hardware store.
Be careful with the screws, they're soft and you can easily thread them. Also, make sure you have spare gaskets for them - we didn't so will have to replace them in the spring. Get a container under the lower screw as you remove it and out should come all the old gear oil. Wait for it to drain completely. We did this overnight.
The dealer had given us a bottle of gear oil and a pump attachment but not for a Yamaha motor, so the screw fitting on the pump didn’t fit. The solution - just press the nozzle extremely firmly against the bottom drain hole until the oil starts coming out of the top hole, then whip it away and get the screw and gasket back on whilst trying not to lose too much.
You get very cold fingers doing this at -5C though. So always check you have the right fitting on your gear oil pump if you can.
Greasing the points
Last job, a touch of marine grease on the grease points - helpfully clearly labelled in the manual - and we're done. One of the few useful things in the Yamaha manual which is rather light on useful information and diagrams.
Fogging the engine
We would have fogged the engine as well. We had the spray to squirt into the cylinders and then would have turned the engine over a couple of times to get the pistons to move up and down, coating the heads and the cylinder walls. But, we hadn’t checked that our sparkplug wrenches fitted. None of them did, so we couldn’t remove the plugs to do that.
High and dry? Safe and sound?
Here’s our boat now at the top of the bank. The boat’s on rollers to keep it off the ground to allow air to circulate underneath it and hopefully to make it easier to get it out in the spring. We put some higher logs at the front of the boat so when the snow melts, the water can drain out of the drain hole at the back (we remembered to take the plug out).
Ideally, we would remove the motor, clamp it on a frame and store it undercover for the winter. But that's a lot of lifting for my wife and I.
As you can see from the photo our engine is not completely upright (the ideal way to store it) but it’s near enough. And we’ve put a bucket over the propeller shaft to keep snow and water from getting in there, freezing and damaging the fittings.
Now all we have to worry about is the river flooding too high and slamming the boat against our old cabin or the ice coming over the edge of the bank and crushing it or a bear chewing the engine cables or…
Here’s the blog post about when we did it.
Winter comes quickly on the Yukon River. One day the channel is clear and the next morning it's running with pans of ice. Before that happens you need to get your boat out of the water and high up, away from the banks of the river. Otherwise it will be locked in by the winter ice, swept away by the spring break up and spat out anywhere between here and the Bering Sea.
 |
| Our boat - 18' Lowe with a Yamaha 40HP outboard |
Unplugging the pee-hole
Even before you get the boat out of the water you may be trying to run it when temperatures fall below freezing. This can mean that the 'pee-hole' where the water for cooling the motor comes out gets blocked with a plug of ice. You can't run the motor for long if it's blocked as the motor will overheat.
One cold morning we started the motor and no water came from the pee-hole. Solution - run the engine for a couple of minutes to heat up, then shut it off and wait for the heat to melt the ice plug. Also, pouring hot water from a Thermos on the hole will help. (Or you could pee on it yourself.) You may have to repeat this process a few times. Make sure you have the intake in the water, of course as if you don’t you can strain the impeller (the little pump that draws the cooling water in and around the engine).
 |
| Pee-hole (little dark circle in the middle there) |
The Yukon River water stays warmer than the air when it starts to get cold, particularly overnight. Some people leave their lower unit down in the water so it doesn’t freeze. We did this for a while but when the temperatures really start falling you run the danger of water freezing in your cooling system or around the impeller and that can do damage. When it got below about -10C at night we lifted the lower unit out of the water and only put it back down to start it, ideally when the sun had been shining on the motor for a while.
Heavy duty hauling
 |
| Our boat gradually climbing the bank |
Our boat isn't particularly heavy but our 40hp Yamaha outboard motor weighs a ton, well 223lbs / 101kg.
Luckily, a friend had loaned us his chain hoist which had a 10' pull. We anchored the hoist to a spruce tree and then cobbled together lengths of assorted chain and rope to connect the boat to the hoist. Then I started hauling...
 |
| Chain hoist |
 |
| Honda motorised winch |
 |
| Come along |
 |
| Rope a long |
A couple of lessons we learned
Use chain for the pulling or at least rope that doesn't stretch too much. On our first pulls I spent 2-3 feet just pulling out the slack in the rope. Also, if you're using chain, don't buy hugely sturdy chain like we did. It's very heavy and difficult to work with and you're hauling all that extra weight.
Using come-alongs even with a short length of pull can help to take out the slack in the line before you start hauling on the hoist. As ever in the bush, you have to make whatever you’ve got work as you don’t often have the ideal equipment for every job.
Winterising the motor
You’ve got your boat safely out of the water. Now to flush out the water cooling system. Many helpful YouTube videos cheerfully show you hooking your motor up to a hosepipe and letting it run. We don't have hosepipes or any water pressure. We do have plenty of water (there's a creek about 100 yards from where we're hauling the boat out). If we had a water pump and 100 yards of hose...But we have to haul buckets by hand.
 |
| Outboard running in a tote of clean water |
Changing the engine oil
So, you've flushed the cooling system and the motor's nice and warm. Time to change the engine oil. Remove the filler cap, undo the drain screw and catch the oil in a container. We bought an official Yamalube kit. Plenty of oil, a pair of disposable gloves, a spare gasket for the oil drain screw and a keyring(?). The only thing is, the oil comes in 946ml opaque bottles and you need to measure out 440ml. We don't have graduated beakers here, so guesswork it is.
Now to change the oil filter. Fiddly things to get off. I had bought a cuplike attachment for our ratchet that exactly fitted the oil filter. Except that it didn't work, it just kept slipping. We couldn’t get an adjustable strap wrench. Don’t buy the cuplike one, they’re useless. So I punched a large nail through the old filter at a careful angle to avoid damaging anything around it in the engine and screwed it off that way. I screwed the new one on wearing a pair of bright orange washing up gloves for extra grip - don't tell anyone.
 |
| The perfect accessory for tightening an oil filter |
Next, drain the gear oil. That's the oil that lubricates the lower unit where the power is transmitted to the propeller. Get the engine running to warm up the gear oil. We put fuel stabiliser into the gas tank earlier and we now ran the engine out of gas at the same time. There will always be a bit of fuel left in the engine and the stabiliser stops it from reacting with the air over time and possibly corroding the engine.
To change the gear oil, open the top screw first - we needed a very wide flat-headed screwdriver. Check which size you need before you’re 60 miles from a hardware store.
Be careful with the screws, they're soft and you can easily thread them. Also, make sure you have spare gaskets for them - we didn't so will have to replace them in the spring. Get a container under the lower screw as you remove it and out should come all the old gear oil. Wait for it to drain completely. We did this overnight.
The dealer had given us a bottle of gear oil and a pump attachment but not for a Yamaha motor, so the screw fitting on the pump didn’t fit. The solution - just press the nozzle extremely firmly against the bottom drain hole until the oil starts coming out of the top hole, then whip it away and get the screw and gasket back on whilst trying not to lose too much.
You get very cold fingers doing this at -5C though. So always check you have the right fitting on your gear oil pump if you can.
Greasing the points
Last job, a touch of marine grease on the grease points - helpfully clearly labelled in the manual - and we're done. One of the few useful things in the Yamaha manual which is rather light on useful information and diagrams.
 |
| Where to grease the motor |
We would have fogged the engine as well. We had the spray to squirt into the cylinders and then would have turned the engine over a couple of times to get the pistons to move up and down, coating the heads and the cylinder walls. But, we hadn’t checked that our sparkplug wrenches fitted. None of them did, so we couldn’t remove the plugs to do that.
High and dry? Safe and sound?
 |
| The boat in its winter home |
Ideally, we would remove the motor, clamp it on a frame and store it undercover for the winter. But that's a lot of lifting for my wife and I.
As you can see from the photo our engine is not completely upright (the ideal way to store it) but it’s near enough. And we’ve put a bucket over the propeller shaft to keep snow and water from getting in there, freezing and damaging the fittings.
 |
| Bucket to protect the propellor shaft |
Here’s the blog post about when we did it.
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