[Gerry Zagorski]

In short, the outboard motor should be easy since the salt water drains out of the outboard itself... A few things you want to do before storing it.

- Not 100% necessary but a good idea to run the engine on the hose and muffs to flush out all the saltwater out of the cooling side. Do this idling since you might not have enough pressure on the hose to keep up with the engine water pump if you race the engine.
- Treat the fuel in the tank with stabil and make sure to run the boat so the treated fuel gets into the motor as well. Best way to do this is to treat the fuel before your last trip to be sure it gets through the entire system, otherwise you have to run the boat on the hose.
- Fog the cylinders. You can do this by removing the plugs, shoot some fogging spray in them, crank the engine with the plugs out so it coats the cylinder walls and reinstall the plugs. If you want to change the plugs I would recommend you leave the old plugs in and once you start it up in the spring and burn off all the fogging oil, change them then.
- A lot of people like to change the engine and lower unit oil before they lay up. A good thing to do since it needs to be done now or when you launch in the spring. If the lower end oil is milky, it has water in it and you need to get it out before you lay up and have it pressure tested. Finding this out in the spring when the yards are busy could delay your launch and you don't want that contaminated fluid sitting in you lower unit all winter.


As far as the fresh and saltwater wash downs, sinks and head you definitely want to winterize them with the pink anti freeze or the hoses and pumps can freeze up and cause damage.

On the fresh water side, pump out as much water as you can out of the fresh water tank, add a few gallons on pink anti freeze to the tank and run all spigots until you see anti freeze coming out of them... Leave the spigots open when you stow it.

As far as the saltwater wash downs and bait wells, they need to be done as well because all the water will not drain out. If you can get to the hose inside the boat running to your through hull, remove it from the through hull, stick those hose into a gallon of pink anti freeze and run the pump until you see the pink stuff coming out of the spigots. If you can't get to it you will need to put a muff over the through hull from the outside and run the the anti freeze through it. If you have to go the muff route on the salt water side this is likely a 2 man job since you have to keep the muff in place and run the pumps at the same time.

It's a fairly straight forward job once you have a the stuff you need and there's no rocket science involved.