Anyway, after Greg (the mechanic) and the staff give the OK it's back to Rivers End until Wed. After the usual stops I arrive about 10:30 am to find..............I'm boat #8
WTH, doesn't anyone work anymore? 
Ok so I join the Pow Wow after preparing the Ranger. What's nice about the Pow Wow is that you're spending time with new friends, listening to stories of both yester year and last week, while the smell of grilled hot dogs fill the air. Dennis and Jake have it down with Jake as Chef and Dennis as sous chef. These guys bring all the accompaniments too. Even the Blue Jay takes part on occasion. Well the Pow Wow breaks up when Richard and Gerry arrive, as anxious anticipation of when to start and when weigh in will be. With in a short time you can hear the diesels start and the line creep like a Bruce Springsteen concert doors opening. Stick arrived and we loaded the Ranger. The plan to go where we've been trying to go for 2 weeks. Finally, we power up the river and on our way. We get to St. Francis and are about to overtake another boat when................. Beep,
beep, beep, beep, beep, beep the alarm goes off. Now I don't know about you guys, but on the older vessels I've had when the alarm goes off there's an indicator light that lets you know what's wrong. Is it overheating? No. Is there no water pressure? No there's pressure and the motor is peeing. We slow and the alarm goes off. Lift the motor to see if weeds are blocking the intake....nope that's not it either. OK lets go, as soon as the RPMs got to 4500, Beep again 6 times. OK fish this spot for an hour. (the engine temp gauge read 135 - 140). So we catch our first keeper. My heads not into this as what the heck could be wrong. OK lets head back to Ladd's. Off we go and as soon as the RPMs hit 3500 Beep beep again 6 times. We get down by Ladd's and Stick and I are trying to figure out what's wrong. Anyway we're near enough so we'll make it back easy. Fish on. (No not that Fish On, the one that means keep fishing
) With about 2 hrs to go, I google 6 beeps on a Merc pro XS 250. The AI answer is a "non-critical sensor fault" What the heck is a non critical sensor? I though all sensors are critical to something or else why would they be called a sensor 
Just sayin. Anyway, Stick hooks one about 5, then another about 3 soon we have about 14lbs with no time left on the clock. Now, what I learned at one of the Pow Wows, was if your on the cusp of getting paid, hold you fish and check out the weights as they come in. Well tonight it took 16 to get paid. Seeing as I just left Anger's Paradise dba C&C last Sat. I asked Richard if I could drop the boat of tomorrow. He gave me the OK.
Thursday morning I head over to C&C with the Ranger and tell Greg it's beeping 6 times. He's not happy, but tells me the boat will have to be left outside until he can get to it. I tell him I'm good with that. He tells me he'll hook it up to the computer and see what the fault is while I'm there. (Now according to service manuals, the Pro XS 250 is serviced every 100 hrs. Greg says I have about 15 hours to go for my second service) (the lower unit I service once a year) Greg hooks up the computer and it's a low oil warning. Wait!........ on a four stroke?
Who knew? Greg tell me I need to check the oil in the engine once a month. (talk about 
) But wait, on a start up the computer does a full systems check so why when it showed oil as OK did it not indicate a problem? Guess you don't ask that kind of question, because we added 3 qts before checking. Oh well. So 75 bucks later and 5 qts of oil (2 for the boat, 3 for the engine we're good to go. I hope. They say with the dark clouds that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, but it sure strikes close. TL
FE
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