An Inconvenient Truth: Green Motors Are Anything but Smooth Sailing

¿ Add the manufacturer's recommended amount of fuel stabilizer to every tank when you fill up, unless you're going to burn up the tank within a week or so. The two most popular stabilizers are Star Tron and Sta-Bil, both of which Noyes said help keep ethanol from separating, and as a result keep water that gets absorbed in the fuel from accumulating in troublesome concentrations at the bottom of the tank. (And yes, fuel stabilizers are expensive).

"But you must put the stabilizer in when you fuel up," he said. "It doesn't do any good to do it afterwards."

Noyes said engines most severely affected by E10 appear to be two-stroke, fuel-injected outboards, followed by two-stroke, carbureted outboards. Inboard-outboard engines rank third on his hit list, followed by four-stroke outboards and finally by inboards.

Some older inboard-powered boats basically can be put to death by E10. Cabin cruisers and the like built before 1986 may have internal fiberglass fuel tanks that are molded into the hull. E10 eats at the fiberglass and turns it to jelly, and the only way to remove the tanks to replace them with stainless steel, aluminum or modern plastic is to chainsaw through the hull. "That's why you see a lot of old cabin cruisers rotting away on shore," Noyes said.

It's been a hard summer on my small-engine fleet, and E10 is the prime suspect. In September, the old 70-horsepower Evinrude gave up the ghost during a fishing trip to the Bay Bridge. It went with a flourish at full speed, little parts clattering in the combustion chambers before it locked up altogether. Oh well, it was34 years old. . . .

Then the Johnson 25 on the crab boat kept breaking down at speed and refusing to start. After rebuilding the carburetor once, the normal answer to a fuel delivery breakdown, Noyes showed me a little trick -- just remove the fuel drain at the bottom of the carburetor and pump fresh fuel through, onto a paper towel. "A lot of the time that'll push the gunk out and solve the problem," he said. And it did!

Now it's November and time to put everything to bed for the winter. What to do to ensure a stress-free first outing next spring? Stabilize the fuel in the recommended amount and leave the tank about halfway full of fresh gas, Noyes said. Fog the motor with fogging oil the usual way, and put a new, 10-micron cartridge in the fuel separator before setting out in the spring.

That's the plan. But who knows what really works? I read on the Web site Tidalfish.com last week that the worst thing you can do is fill the tanks halfway for the winter.

We're all working in the dark here, plugging along blind in a world where everything keeps changing.