Hey all. My 2003 50 hp Mercury is kicking my tail. Got my boat last month with 106 hours on the motor and had to pull the carbs twice to get them clean. Previous owner left the boat sitting around with ethanol fuel. It was sold to me with 25 gallons of old fuel in it so I put in the Seafoam and some fresh fuel along with a water separator. Finally got the boat running decent (at 125 hours now)and took it out yesterday and it started running rough during a fishing trip. Could barely get it to idle and it stalled many times on me but it seemed to run okay at WOT. Went to top off the oil when I got back to the ramp and it barely seemed to use any during the fishing trip. I ran it off and on for a least an hour on the hour gauge and it barely used any oil. That had me worried so I brought it home and hooked it up to the ears and ran the motor and marked the level on the tank. It seemed to drop a fraction of an inch while running a few minutes and I even disconnected the oil line from the tee above the oil pump and ran the motor for about 5 seconds and it pushed oil out so I assume the auto oiler is running okay. When I would start the engine today I could rev it up to 2500 rpms or so and it would run for a few seconds then the rpms would gradually decline until the motor stalled. While it would be in the process of stalling a black oily discharge was coming out the exhaust in the prop along with the water. It was black and gritty. Turns out I had a bad fuel line inside the motor housing that the ethanol broke down and ate up from the inside. It totally had the fuel filter clogged with the black debris so I changed out that fuel line, fuel filter and pulled and cleaned the carbs AGAIN (3rd time for this boat grrrrrrr) thinking that I had figured out the problem. I guess that was not it because now the oil discharge is a little clearer but still there. Almost makes a milky puddle behind the prop exhaust. If anything the boat runs worse now. Hard to get started and will die out again in a few seconds. I am about at my whits end with this motor. Did I kill the motor when it did not use any oil?? I would be highly pissed that an engine would take a dump at barely over 100 hours without any warning. I have attached a couple of pics of the discharge and the debris. HELP!
