After setting up a new ROMS application a saw that, after a few time steps, the surface water temperature was to high (120oC) and salinity was also too high (100 or more).
The problem was that I mistakenly used an atmospheric forcing file containing a cloud-cover time-series that vary between 0 and 100 (in units of percent), rather than the default range from 0 to 1 (dimensionless fraction). When LONGWAVE tried to estimate the net long wave radiation... it overheated the surface.
I am posting this as a reference... in case someone finds boiling water in their model.