Yamaha Water Intake

[GarySWI]

I have a 2026 SSR with a 90 HP Yamaha motor.

I live on a canal that connects to our lake. It's a dead end canal and I live near the end. Unfortunately, the surface of our canal has a bad duckweed problem, sometimes covering the entire surface across its 50 foot wide width. The city does a weekly weed cutting in the canal but the duckweed is too fine to be picked up by the weed cutting machine conveyor which skims the surface.

The problem that I have is the duckweed clogging the narrow water intakes on the motor, occasionally causing a high temperature alarm. I have had some success trimming the motor up until I get to deeper water or a section of the canal without the duckweed but it's not foolproof.

My previous pontoon and my neighbor's pontoon have Mercury motors that have larger openings in the intake allowing the duckweed to flow through without clogging.

Any ideas? Does Yamaha make an intake screen with larger openings?

 

[fitz73222]

I too live duckweed life down here in northeast Florida, and run a Merc and Yamaha on two different boats. Yes, "the big hole" Merc will swallow the duckweed at the expense of sticking the thermostat open and plugging the pee hole. Duckweed really isn't much trouble for the Yamaha but I've learned how to drive through it over the last 40 years. Duckweed's roots are only an inch or two below the waterline, your gearcase water intake is a least a foot deeper. It may seem counter intuitive but try tucking the motor all the way in and idle to a crawl (just in gear). the goal is to keep the ducks at the surface and keep them from being sucked into the propeller vortex which draws them down into the intake area for cooling. For duckweed, deeper is better and slow as you go. This isn't fool proof but seems to work for us.

 

[mtudb24]

While you don't see many on pontoon boats, but we had a couple of "skinny water" aluminum center consoles that we had our marina install nose cone / low water pickups on 70 / 90hp Johnson / mercury outboards. Probably not what you are looking for, but is always a option.