Getting started with Boat Guru

Last updated 2026-04-28

Welcome aboard. Boat Guru is your always-on marine mechanic — a chat assistant that answers questions about your boat, your engine, and the work you're doing on the water or at the dock. Whether you're chasing a no-start, planning a winterization, or trying to remember which oil your outboard wants, Boat Guru is built to give you straight, useful answers.

What Boat Guru is (and isn't)

Boat Guru is a conversational tool. You ask a question in plain English, and it answers like a patient mechanic would. It can reference common service procedures, manufacturer specs for the most popular engines, and recall information from the U.S. Coast Guard. It is not a replacement for hands-on diagnosis when something is genuinely dangerous — if you smell fuel, see smoke, or your boat won't keep you afloat, get safe first and call a pro.

Asking your first question

The fastest way to get a great answer is to be specific. Instead of "my engine won't start," try "my 2018 Mercury 150 four-stroke cranks but won't fire after sitting two weeks." The more context you give — engine make and model, year, what you've already checked — the more targeted the answer will be.

If you're new, here are a few questions that show what Boat Guru does well:

• "What's the recommended oil change interval for a Yamaha F250?"
• "How do I bleed the fuel system on a Volvo Penta D4?"
• "My trim won't go down — where do I start?"

Set up your boat profile

Boat Guru gets dramatically better when it knows what you own. Adding your boat to your profile (manufacturer, model, year, engine details) means every answer is filtered through the right context — no more answers that assume a generic outboard when you're running a sterndrive. See the engines guide for why this matters and how to get it right.

Free vs Pro

The free tier is generous: you can ask everyday questions, save a boat profile, and subscribe to recall alerts. Pro unlocks longer chat history, the ability to upload your own service manuals so answers cite the exact pages from your book, and priority support response times. You can compare tiers and upgrade any time on your billing page — see billing for details.

Where to go next

• Set up your engine in your boat profile — read the engines guide.
• Subscribe to recall alerts so you hear about safety notices on your hardware.
• Stuck? The troubleshooting guide explains how to get unstuck and how to flag a wrong answer so we can fix it.

If you ever feel like Boat Guru misunderstood something, the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons under every answer feed directly into how we improve. Use them. Honest feedback is how this gets sharper for every owner on the water.