One for the serious gear head

[Popeye1959]

A couple weeks ago I towed my boat about 125 miles to a camping/fishing outing with my stock '03 Explorer Sport XLT. Nary a problem on the way up there. Next morning we trailered the boat a couple miles to the boat ramp and launched the boat. Parked the truck in the shade and went fishing for about 8 hours. Went to start the truck up to recover the boat and it sounded like it was only firing/running on 3-4 cylinders. Loping and rough running and spewing blue smoke. Barley had enough power to pull the boat (2,000 pounds of boat) out of the water and up the ramp. Didn't want to shut the engine off on the ramp for fear it wouldn't restart and I would be blocking the ramp. Pulled up to finish securing the boat and shut the motor off. 10 minutes later I went to restart the Explorer and it cranked right up and idled without any issues. Never once was there any kind of code thrown (that I could tell at least). It's been 3 weeks and it still hasn't done it again.

Any ideas what might have caused it?

Outside air temp was in the upper 70's lower 80's. Truck did take a little longer to crank up when it ran rough.

 

[Turdle]

Water may have got into the cats and cause them to cool off?

 

[Popeye1959]

Water may have got into the cats and cause them to cool off?

Are you inferring that lake water may have gotten into the exhaust? Not a chance, never that far down the ramp.

 

[joecrna]

Blue smoke is oil.

 

[lounge lizard]

junk in the trunk! LOL

have you ever put dry gas or injector cleaner or any gas treatment in your tank with a fill up??

maybe from being on the angle dropping the boat in the wter, the motor sucked up some crud off the bottom of the tank.

once it had cleared the crud from the fuel line it started running fine again.

 

[Popeye1959]

I've used this truck to launch my boat at least 20 times this year, never a problem. Don't use any additives. I've had fuel filters clog before and they don't give these symptoms.

At first I thought it was timing, but since it corrected itself upon the restart, I don;t see that as a viable cause.

 

[4pullingGM]

Hard to say since it hasn't acted up again, I've seen some pretty weird and random problems get taken care of by reprogramming the PCM. May be worth looking into.

 

[my98nnj]

Blue smoke is oil burning.

The only way oil gets into the combustion chamber while the engine is off is through the valve guides.

Possibly just a freak incident or your valve guides are starting to leak a bit.

 

[Popeye1959]

I'm going with freak occurrence as it doesn't smoke now or before and this was the only time it's happened.