I am about to tear my hair out with my trolling motor. I'm hoping this is something simple and someone knows how to fix it. It's a Minn Kota PowerDrive V2, 40 lb. thrust.
Background: The motor is about a year and a half old. When I originally got it, I used it with a foot pedal. However, just a hair past the one-year mark, the foot pedal stopped working properly. It had gotten wet when I got stuck out in an extremely heavy rainstorm, and after that, it would occasionally come on by itself, or refuse to work at all when I needed it.
I talked to the service center and they said I shouldn't have gotten it wet. They said the foot pedal is "water resistant but not water proof." They said I should just buy a new pedal because it would only cost $15 less to repair it.
Side note: What is the deal, Minn Kota??? What kind of stupid effing idiots make a control for a trolling motor, on a BOAT, that you can't get wet??? 
I decided I'd just get one of the keychain-type remotes instead of a new foot pedal. I would have preferred the foot pedal for hands-free use, but I do fish in the rain from time to time, and stuff on casting decks like a foot pedal can get knocked overboard, so I wasn't willing to go that route again. I can't afford to be buying a new foot pedal every year at $100.00 a pop.
SO I bought the remote, which is "plug and play," and mounted it on my boat, following the instructions in the manual meticulously. It worked for less than two hours.
It worked absolutely fine at the lower settings. Everything was great. But I went to move from one place to another, so I bumped the power up to the maximum setting and started heading toward where I wanted to go.
The motor ran continuously in the highest setting for about 30 seconds, and then it abruptly stopped. It was like everything reset - it still worked, but it reset to the lowest power setting. So I bumped it back up to maximum power, turned it on again, and started moving down the lake. After thirty seconds, it abruptly stopped and reset again.
A bit frustrated, I decided I'd just back it off a notch or two and head to where I was going a little more slowly. So I turned the motor on, bumped it to maximum, and I was about to back it off - but within a second or two, it shut off again.
This time it was shut off completely, like it had blown a fuse or something. The motor is completely dead and doesn't respond to the remote at all. Even the little light-up button on the motor which checks the amount of remaining battery power doesn't work.
Any ideas? Is there some sort of internal circuit breaker on the motor that has been tripped?
Why the hell did this happen and how do I get it to not happen again?
Seriously, what I'd really like to do is say, "Go to hell, Minn Kota, I will buy a MotorGuide trolling motor and never, ever use one of your unreliable products again." I've got a MotorGuide trolling motor on my bass boat and it is practically bulletproof and has never caused me a single problem in years of use.
However, I don't have it in the budget to buy a new trolling motor right now. I need to fix this one.
Any ideas?
bd