Looking more closely at the wire on the new transducer, there is a white wire, a black wire, a bare wire and a foil sheathing. Yuck! So I am going to just deal with the dreadful job of installing a new transducer (I bought two) without a splice and routing the wire through the boat. I'll take the one a I bought where I cut the wire and splice the wire back together and save it as a spare. And BTW, I would never have a splice in the bilge. The splice I was attempting to make was 4 feet above the cabin sole.

Thank for all of you for your input. As an old friend says, "If it were easy, you couldn't call it life."