Sherwin,

I ran the carburetor over to the mechanic, who saw ominous signs of
residual fuel at the bottom of the float chamber. These were cleaned with
solvent and a high pressure air hose. Next came the two jets, low and high speed.
They were completely opaque, which he fixed by poking an appropriate wire through them
to open them up. The low speed was so fine that he had to improvise
by taking a strand of wire from some multi-strand electrical wire. He showed me
where the drain screw location and advised me to open it up for draining,

Glad it worked out for you. That is precisely the problem I expected
you to find. Oh yeah, good point about the fuel drain screw on the
side of the carb. Forgot to mention that.

I went through an identical scenario on my Yamaha 9.9 4-stroke when I
started it for the first time this season, except that I disassembled
the carb on my kitchen island (over a bunch of newspaper of course).

After judicious cleaning with q-tips and lacquer thinner, and improvising
different sized wires to clean the jets, I used compressed air to blow
everything dry and then re-assembled with the original gaskets.

Its running like a champ now

Don W.