The icy blast of arctic air that pushed freezing temperatures across the area last winter left a wake of damage in its path. No one felt it in their pocket books more than some local boat owners. Area boat dealers this year report seeing a huge increase in damage to boat motors caused by last winter’s freeze. With this increased volume of boats needing engine replacements and major repairs, local service departments became backed up. Since a large number of these problems were not discovered by boat owners until late spring, many missed out on this year’s best boating months.
“Due to the long duration of the sub freezing temperatures earlier this year, many boats that had previously been unharmed through the winter months experienced major freeze damage” said Chris Knight of H&W Marine. “The results of freeze damage on a marine motor are very costly to repair. This major expense and inconvenience is easily preventable with proper winterization of your boat. Unfortunately, people tend to put off this important preventive maintenance and once we have our first hard freeze; it could be too late!”

Read the rest at http://etoutdoors.com/?p=272

Keep it inside and you shouldn't have any problems. That and taking it out to run it periodically.

I have never had a problem with an outboard. Even if the winter of 83. I even went duck hunting a couple of the days in that 10 day stretch. Now if you own an I/O winterization is a different matter all together.

What is this winterization you speak of? I'm from Texas, we use our boats all winter.

All Ive ever done is check lowerunit grease and tilt motor down,guess Ive been lucky (do run stabil year round)

Winter? where is it. I've been in shorts and t shirt all week. I took out all the jackets from storage a month ago and have yet to use it. My flowers are starting to bloom

Ready for spring.

Just came in from mowing the grass to read this warning about winterization.



I do have a small set of old style Christmas lights ready to plug in and wrap the lower unit and toss the rest in the bilge to keep a frost off the bilge/livelwell pumps .

I learned a very expensive lesson 2 years agoI did not check my lower unit oil and water froze inside and killed it. Dang fishing line eat up my LU seal. $2500.00 later, and much more cautious, I check my LU before every freeze. I pull the bottom plug and look at my oil. It takes all of about 1 minute to do. Also, having a carb motor, I never let it sit more than 2 weeks without putting the muffs on it and letting it run for 10-15 minutes. Then of course, I trim it all the way up, then all the way down. This is important on my motor because there is always some fluid that only comes out trimmed all the way up. Then I check the LU oil again. My motor has never had a tank of fuel ran through it that did not have Stabil and Ring Free. It's expensive to run, but extremely expensive not to run.

+1 on running Stabil and Ring Free.