What Happens AFTER A Boat SINKS?

[Music] every single boater's worst nightmare is probably going to be the event of having their boat sink now you need to see these exact steps that we are about to go over if you ever happen to be or happen to have a friend of yours on the unfortunate side of this nightmare which can happen for many different reasons whether that be an issue in the boat tying up to a dock incorrectly hitting ground or any of the other reasons that we have already covered in detail in other videos especially made just for you the boater that loves their boat boating and destroying that like button for the youtube algorithm and the reason why you have joined the thousands of other boaters by hitting that subscribe button so that you never miss any of the helpful boating information that we publish every single week now one of the first things that we need to keep in mind in the event that a boat goes down is when can you get to work on it and how did it go down because as soon as the boat gets lifted out of the water whether by being floated or dragged out the engine then needs to be immediately addressed after it comes out of the water this is vital to the determination of being able to save the engine or not once the engine hits the air that is when the rusting is going to start and the reason we want to know how it went down is that it matters a lot depending on whether everything had power to it or not if the boat goes down with dead batteries you will be able to save more parts on the boat than if it went down with power and everything on because this is the worst case scenario and could be catastrophic if the engine was running when it went under the water more than likely if it took water into the engine and when the engine is spinning around and swallows up a bunch of water it usually destroys the engine because water does not compress and because it doesn't compress it will bend piston rods blow out cylinder heads gaskets blocks and has a high percentage of making the engine worthless when it comes out of the water so if you are going down and have the time turn off the batteries before it happens one of the features about water is that it is conductive for electricity meaning that electricity can flow through the water very easily if the electronics are running when the boat goes down the water will allow the power to flow throughout the water and be trying to make its way back to the battery this can cause all kinds of shorts in your electrical components which can very easily destroy them it's the same concept of dropping your phone in the water if the phone was off when you dropped it in and you wait a day or two to allow it to dry out before you try turning it on you have a higher chance of saving the phone whereas if you immediately try to turn it on and there is water inside of it the water will allow electricity to flow across the electrical circuits inside of the phone shorting it out and destroying it now the boat goes underwater the engine sinks you pull it out of the water and immediately get to start working on it the one two three steps for saving an engine aren't as important as that you make sure you don't miss any of these steps if we are talking about going down in salt water it's a good first step to spray the engine down with some fresh water and wash it off as much as possible what we are going to do next is get all the water out of the engine this will vary a little depending on whether you have a two stroke or a four stroke but either way we need to get all the water out of the engine now we will be doing this on a four stroke but for a two stroke the main difference is that you will have to drain the carbs take out the plugs and turn the engine over by hand to get the water out then the rest of the steps will be very similar to what we are going to do here we are going to drain the oil from the engine but you'll want a bigger bucket depending on how much water is in the engine and you can also pull the dipstick to allow water to come out there as well just remember that the oil is going to be on top of the water so eventually you won't be draining water from the dipstick it will turn to oil so put the dipstick back in whenever you see oil start to come out [Music] that's not what you want then the rest will just be drained out into the bucket until we get to seeing the oil draining and we'll let all that old oil drain out of the engine while all that water and oil is draining out we can remove the intake assembly to make sure we let all the water out of the air side of the engine depending on what engine you have you'll basically just remove the air intakes and the throttle body assembly because that will also be full of water this will take care of most of the water in the air side of the system because we will get rid of the rest of the water that is going to be in the intake manifold in a little bit we are going to now move over to getting all the water out of the fuel side of the system on this engine that requires us to remove the side chaps so that we can get to the fuel supply module and pull that off so that we can drain it it's pretty much the same thing as a vapor separator tank or vst and out of all the engines that we've had to get running after sinking i've found it to be about a 50 50 chance that the fuel system will have water in it and that is mainly because they are a pretty sealed system but to stay on the safe side of things i'd go ahead and just drain the fuel system because you never know what is going on when the engine went down and how long it was down for which all plays a factor in this situation we'll drain any filters on the engine and then we will hook up an external fuel tank with some known good fuel in it because the fuel system on a boat is vented it's not a sealed fuel system like what is in a car when a boat sinks water can enter into the fuel tank by the vent and fill the fuel tank up with water so it's just best to just bypass the fuel tank that is in the boat in order to get the engine running first then you'll be able to deal with the boat side of things after that now after we've pulled the fsm and drained all the water and fuel that is in it or drained all the water and fuel that is in the vst we can reassemble the fuel system components and with that hooked up to our clean fuel source we will disconnect the fuel line from the fuel rail to allow that to drain and will prime up the system filling up the fuel system with fresh clean fuel for when we are ready to start and run the engine with that all ready for us we can remove the ignition coils and spark plugs from the engine then we will want to take a socket and a ratchet to put on the flywheel so that we can turn the engine over by hand we will fill the cylinders with some fogging oil or some kind of oil and turn the engine over by hand pumping out all the water that is left in the cylinders as we turn the engine over we'll be getting all the water that is left in all of the different systems to drain out from the crankcase and getting the water out of the oil pump the head the oil cooler and down to the oil pan when we've still got it draining and all the water that is in the intake manifold and going into the cylinders just continue to turn it over a few times and then refill the cylinders with oil to keep everything lubed up once we get to the point where there is no more water coming out of the engine will drain any more water out of the oil pan then reinstall the drain plug and we can fill the engine up with some fresh oil before we try to start the engine generally the battery cables and the batteries are going to be shot so we'll disconnect the battery cables from the boat and hook the engine up to a known good battery with some good battery cables basically we are doing a lot of the things that we have shown you how to do if you wanted to be able to start an engine that is not connected to a boat say you are wanting to buy a used engine to repower your boat and it's on a rack that video shows you exactly how to start and run the engine while it's on a stand now before we try to start the engine we'll load the cylinders up again with some more oil and then with the plugs still out of the engine we can turn the starter over a few times to get any more water that might still be in the system out of the system so that it can't get into the cylinders which would result in a bent rod or damaged engine because we know that water does not compress this is also if the starter will still turn over there are some cases when the starting solenoid on the starter won't let the starter turn over so we'll need to use the good old screwdriver trick to short out the starter and provide it with enough juice to turn the engine over [Music] now as long as you have done all these things ensuring that you have all the water out of the engine where there won't be any more water getting into the cylinders we're ready to try and start the engine depending on what kind of engine you're working on you'll have to check out our other video about starting the engine to see more about how to let the engine know you are trying to start it without it being hooked up to the boat but we can now install the plugs into the engine and get water hooked up to it as well then just jump that starter and hopefully as long as the computers and everything are still operating the engine is going to start and run once the engine is running this is a great sign but there's still one more crucial step that you're going to want to do but before we show you what that step is make sure you don't forget to hit that like button and make sure you're subscribed to the channel also remember that we are producing more helpful content that you can find on our website at boriganboating.com now the last step that you want to do is make sure you change that engine oil again after running the engine for about 10 to 15 minutes the oil is going to be washing out the engine and collecting any little water droplets that are still going to be inside of the engine so after running it for say 10-15 minutes we want to drain out the milky oil from running the engine at idle so that we can put new oil in again before taking the boat out and running the engine at speed you do not want to get the engine turning wide open throttle with this milky diluted oil still in the engine because it doesn't provide the same amount of lubrication that it needs and yes it is a little more costly basically wasting the oil like this but it's the quickest way to get the water out of the engine and get it running again you want to get the engine up and running as quickly as possible and then continue to run it for as long as you can to heat it up and dry out all the components that are on the engine this will lessen the rust and corrosion issue as much as possible hopefully you never have to deal with this kind of issue but it does happen so let us know if you've ever had a friend that has had a sunken engine before and here are some other videos that you might have missed thank you all for hanging out with us this week and we look forward to seeing you next week [Music]

Channel: Born Again Boating

Views: 97,166

Rating: 4.9510012 out of 5

Keywords: boat, boating, sink, sunk, sank, engine, motor, outboard, help, diy, now what, how-to, fix, running, ran, run, mercury, yamaha, suzuki, honda, tohatsu, evinrude, johnson, e-tec, raise, water, after, underwater

Id: saMhW4TKC4o

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021