Hello all... New guy here trying to find some help for my 1996 Mercury 115 Outboard. The serial number on the engine is 06348466. This engine is on a 1996 Maxum 1900XR that I bought off a guy after sitting for 2 1/2 years. The boat had been covered and stored outdoors and had sat through 2 harsh North Dakota winters. The engine and lower unit had been properly winterized prior to the boat being parked. We removed the cover and the engine was very clean. Actually, it looked brand new. I pulled the plugs and they all looked good as well. I removed all of the old gas that was in the tank and put fresh in. Put the muffs on in the driveway and she fired right up. For approximately the first 3 minutes, we had to pump the primer bulb to keep it running/idling. After that, it stayed hard and we never had any more issues. We've had it to the lake twice and both times it ran, what I would consider pretty well for sitting as long as it had. However... This weekend, we went to a much larger lake and was out all day for 2 days in a row. The first day resulted in the boat running very well with only 1 stumble/stall as I tried to pull up a skier. After that one time, we got the skier up no problem and it ran fine the rest of the day. The 2nd day started out like the day before but as the day went on I noticed it was getting harder to keep the engine running. Trying to hold any consistent RPM's above idol, the engine would bog down/stall and eventually shut off if I didn't pull the throttle back to the idol position. If I shut the engine off and just sat for a while, it would seem to help, but within a matter of minutes it would do the same thing. It just continued to get worse as we were trying to make it back to where we put in. We finally idled in and got loaded up. I checked the primer bulb several times while we were trying to get back in and it seemed to be hard the hole time. Seemed to act like a fuel starvation issue, but I'm new to these engines and was hoping to see if someone had some good places to start in my trouble shooting efforts. Thanks in advance for you your help!
