No Replacement For Displacement

Well, today my boat sh*t the bed. I got my boat from my dad a few years ago when he no longer had the energy to maintain it. The hull is about 17 years old, and the motor(an Evinrude 115) is 28 years old, so it doesn't have a lot of resale value. The slip I rent each year is probably just a hair cheaper than the boat itself, and now that I own it, I understand on a deep level the saying that a boat is a hole in the water into which money is poured... Nonetheless, the boat does normally run fine, the lights, horn, etc work, and it is still able to run at a good 45 mph. Today, though, when I got into the boat, and turned the key, hoping for another day of watery bliss, it cranked real s-l-o-w-l-y, then just died. I could tell the battery was dead, so I unhooked it and took it home and it is now sitting in the charger. Now I have to figure out if I have a short somewhere in the electrical system, or if the alternator is bad on the motor. A short would be hard to diagnose, but perhaps easier to fix. An Alternator problem will mean that I will have to pay close attention to the battery charge, and I will have to wait until the end of summer to fix it. If I try to get it fixed--good bye summer. So, I am going to spend the next few weeks being really paranoid and charging my battery every few days. Yuck.