[jongolds]

I'm surprised. I was guessing WOT rpms should have been closer to 6k. My old boat's I/O had a WOT range in the area of 5,500 and I thought outboards were higher.

Unfortunately, I have no water pressure guage and no numbers on the temp guage. The pee hole seems to flow alright at idle. The temp guage just goes from C to H. No numbers. It's normally (in my limited use) run about 1/4 of the way up off of C. When it was over heating, it ran all the way over to H. Bringing the throttle back down dropped the temps right away.

I was really hoping that being overpropped might be the cause of the overheating. It doesn't sound like my pitch is too far off though. I'm not thrilled with the low 30s top speed either. I was expecting more. Another benefit of it being the prop would have been that I could run it carefully as is for another couple of weeks with out worrying about damaging anything and then just changed the prop in shallow water once it warms up. Doing the thermostat or pump will all require pulling the boat out. That means waiting for high tide to pull it out and to put it back in.