Random stall when hot, no restart for a while. Then starts again. 1997 5.7EFI

[geekwithoutacause]

I will describe how I got to the stall situation;
Boat in water, idle in gear out of no-wake-zone.
Run her up to 3K rpm for a while, then run at idle until anchor place found. dropped anchor, hung out for about an hour.
Then start engine and idle in gear for 30 mins. Then...
Engine stumbles, then stalls.
Tried to restart engine, which seems to rev up for maybe 1 second then stalls again. Tried 4 or 5 times.
Ask for a tow and someone tows us back to marina. About 10 mins into tow, I try another start and engine starts right up. Runs fine. Let it idle (no gear) while towed and no issues.
When I get to the marina I change fuel filter. I don't notice anything in the filter, clear fuel. When I removed the fuel filter (spin off) No fuel spilled out at all which surprised me..Did see fuel standing in the filter.

After the fuel filter change I ran it for quite a while at idle in gear. No issues at all. Ran just fine, no more stalls.
so... now what? I am thinking it was the fuel filter but.. How does that explain it starting back up after 10 mins ?
Any part I should check ? I am wondering if anything electrical didn't like being heat soaked when I was at anchor.

 

[Jns1981]

just solved something similar this past weekend.. have an '87 merc 3.0 that stalled when hot & needed a cool down to re-start..I started with fuel filter (not much gas spilled from mine either), then to carb, turned out to be the ignition coil.

 

[geekwithoutacause]

just solved something similar this past weekend.. have an '87 merc 3.0 that stalled when hot & needed a cool down to re-start..I started with fuel filter (not much gas spilled from mine either), then to carb, turned out to be the ignition coil.

Yes, I was also leaning towards ignition coil. What kind do these use ? I have the engine serial nr but don't see any mention on that for the various coils I see for sale....