Boat keeps crapping out???

[Gramps]

I have a friend with an 03' SANTE he has 167 hours on it as of this weekend. For the past month or so he has been having a problem with it at IDLE speeds once the boat gets warm.

For example: While going back for a fallen rider his boat starts to sputter and sometimes just stalls. When he attempts to restart it the boat will not start after letting it sit for a few minutes he is able to start it back up.

When pulling his 3 year old nephew at slow speeds the boat will start to sputter and spit and then dies altogether.

Today while idling up river it started running rough and just quit after 10 minutes of idling.

THIS ONLY HAPPENS AT IDLE OR NEAR IDLE SPEEDS AND IS INTERMITTENT.

He has taken it to the dealer and they replaced the fuel cell and it still acts up.

While checking the 3 relays in the boat we found one was EXTREMELLY hot and the others were just normal warm like from the engine heat......is it normal to have one or all of them get HOT?

My boat has never done this and since it wasn't at the river this weekend I couldn't check to see if the relays got hot or not.

When this starts to happen we also start to get a heavy gas smell from the engine compartment.

He has the PCM 330hp engine with closed cooling if this helps or not

Any feed back would be great

Thanks, Gramps

[DRAGON88]

RE: Boat keeps crapping out???

My vote is for the FP relay... I had something similar going on in my old GT-40. It's defineitely worth the $10 to check it out.

[Laptom]

RE: Boat keeps crapping out???

How are the spark plugs when the engine stalls? Are some of them wet? Are the spark plug wires good, not broken? I would imagine that some fuel won't get ignite sufficiently when you smell gas. So some sparks aren't getting enough power. Work from the bottem up I suggest, but it could be something easy like a relay. They can get hot, it depends how much power they have to switch.