Axis Wakeboard Boat Forum

Ok guys, I'm reaching out to the forums because my dealer and PCM are making way too slow progress on this and I figured it couldn't hurt to ask on here.

Since hour 5 on my boat (now at 125), randomly, and intermittently why boat will throw the Service Required warning and alarm, it will pop up the little MIL light on the dash and you gotta press a button to make the alarm go away. Sometime's it will go into the mode where slows the boat down, but I just have to back to nuetral and take off again and it works fine. This will happen ballast empty, full, half, middle of a wakeboard/surf session, sitting at idle, after sitting for a while, the first time we take off in the morning, etc. It has no pattern whatsoever. It will also also do it one day, then it won't do it the next 3 days, then it will do it 2 days in a row, but maybe only half the day and the other day it will do it all day. This is obviously beyond annoying.

Now the thing is, there's no actual problem with the boat itself, that we can tell. There's no fault codes showing from the setup menu screen and the dealer wasn't able to pull any with the Diacomm software. PCM finally said to swap the engine harness wiring and once they did they were able to start pulling codes. It shows the Exhaust Manifold Water Temp was high even though it was only like 189 degrees, which isn't high, and I don't believe above the threshold for an alarm. It was only doing that on the port manifold. So we swapped the sensors left and right to see if it would follow, still did it. We swapped the sensors out from another T23 that has been working fine for 50 hours, still did it.

Everything on the boat has been working fine and there's no other problem codes being pulled. At this point we've requested PCM engineers to come down and look at the boat in person but I feel they're gonna just have to run the crap out of it to get it to trigger again even because it truly is random from what I can tell. Does anyone have any ideas or heard anything similar to this issue?

Mine did this a few times earlier in the year. It's a 16' T23 I just simply unhooked my battery cables overnight and haven't had any further issues. Boat has 142 hours the beeps started around the 100 hour mark and probably happen 3 times that day. I did the battery disconnect that night and have had no other problems. Good Luck


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Now that I think about it, I was at the lake for 10 days in August, put like 30 hours on it that time, but I was also installing my amps at the time and was disconnecting and reconnecting the battery a lot. It didn't give me much problem at all while I was up there if I recall correctly.

I wonder what in the world leaving the cables disconnected could be fixing?

I believe the engine has to see the code during several (2 or 3 times forget which one) cold starts before it will throw a code. So you could have been resetting the code repeatedly without knowing it.

Do you need to pull the battery cables off? Wouldn't switching the dual battery switch to OFF fully disconnect the ECM?

Switch didn't work on mine. Had to go to the battery.


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From my understanding, if the engine ECU has stored codes they will continue to be there until they are cleared using diacom.

That's also what I was told by the dealer but the simple battery disconnect has worked so far.


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So got an update on my situation with the Exhaust Manifold's

We spoke with PCM and they finally told us (months into this) that they had a couple other boats with a similar issue that that the design of the water lines going to the exhaust manifold isn't designed optimally, meaning that the water line for the exhaust manifold and the prop shaft packing nut housing share the same line but they split off. There's more water than needed going to cool the packing nut, so that means less water for the exhaust manifold. So to remedy this they had the dealership put in a restrictor in the line going to the packing nut so more water would flow into the line for the exhaust manifolds, thus theoretically providing them with more water and making them less apt to overheat.

Well, the first day out after this workaround the alarm went off again, all day, same issue. I told the dealer and now we've gotten Mark Schneider, the Warranty and Technical Services Manager from PCM involved on this and I'm kind of at my wit's end. All indications are that the manifolds aren't actually getting as hot as they say they are because those temps would cause physical damage on the outside with paint and what not, and theoretically there's more water going to them so they should be overheating. I'm supposed to hear back from PCM today with an action plan of what they're planning to do. At this point I kinda just want a new motor or a boat that just works.

80AMT23 -- just FYI, us with 15's had the same issue and there was a Flash to the ECM that fixed it. Sounded like there was a calibration error in the original program. Your issue sounds exactly the same, but could be different... may be worth asking?