Who's our resident outboard motor guy?

Oh yeah. The 1st thing I looked at/ and several times at that. Plenty coming out the telltale squirter. And like immediately upon startup.
While I was out behind the boat on the tube I looked at that several times.
Would make sense though that they would rig an alarm on that system, though. None of the older models I have experience with ever had that.
He did say that he has recently had a new water pump put on. And also along my line of thought about being "heat related"
Sometimes when he'd hit the key it would alarm on startup and the alarm would quit within 20-30 seconds or less and it would run fine for a while. But usually if we turned it to "run" and it was still "alarming" we never even tried to crank it until we could turn the key and have it quiet at "key on"
I didn't have a compression gauge with me at the campground, but when I was pulling plugs to check for another foul out, there is a crusty residue at the block/head junction.
I had a '79 version of the same motor once, and never had any problems with it. (10 years older than this one) I remember checking into availability and pricing of head gaskets and a few other things back then, and they were pretty cheap. I was thinking about getting one and changing it on this one just because.
The one thing about the one that I had, on the leg in the area where the water pump rides within the housing, mine had had a crack that pushed outward from within in line with the water pump vanes. It had been welded up before I ever owned it and in talking with a guy I knew who worked on outboards all the time (back then) he had said that this was common issue with some of that series of engine.
There's no temp gauge on these that I've ever seen, but it never had any smoke/steam coming from any part of the motor.
Again this would pertain to any problems that would be heat/overheat related but that time I pulled the cover and the plugs for inspection while in the water it seems that the motor took less time to "recover" and work as it should, than any other time when I didn't have the cover off the engine. I did think about having him run with the cover off for a while and see if that changed things at all. But we didn't.