My First Outboard Oil Change

This is the first weekend since June that I haven’t been out on my boat, only because I needed time to prepare for next week’s adventure. I’m still working on learning a new fishery, reconfiguring my boat, and packing for the trip. Most of all, I needed to accomplish my first outboard oil change. It’s a big milestone for me to reach the first 100 hours on my boat. I haven’t changed my own oil in my car for some 20 years. However, this time of year boat mechanics schedule 4-6 weeks out, and I sure wasn’t waiting for that. So, I took it as a good opportunity to learn something new.

The engine oil change was a piece of cake and very straightforward. It’s a lot easier to reach everything on an outboard than on a car, since you don’t have to crawl under it to pull the drain plug. However, on an outboard you’re also supposed to change the gear oil in the lower unit (kind of like a transmission for a boat). This proved to be a bit more complex and a lot more messy. The three small plugs are all on the starboard side, so I had to work crouched down on the garage floor in the narrow space between the main engine and the kicker motor. Gear oil is super thick, so instead of simply draining and filling like engine oil, you actually use a special hand pump to fill it from the bottom until it overflows out of a vent on top. There’s a lot more dripping involved; fortunately I’m a cat owner with lots of kitty litter on hand to clean up oil spills.

When I started pumping in the new gear oil, I noticed the stark difference in color between old and new. I dropped what I was doing for 24 hours while I researched it. I was extremely concerned that I was getting water intrusion into the lower unit, which would force me to scrub the trip. However, after I poured it into a mason jar it looked more like what I was expecting, a darker version of the bright blue new gear oil. For now I’m calling it a false alarm. Just to make it more interesting, I decided to lose the drain plug. After dumping all the oil back and forth between different containers hunting for it, I finally found it in a Ziploc bag full of oily rags. I’ve sure learned a lot about outboards this year.