Hello everyone and thank you for the opportunity to be a part of the CYO community. I recently bought a new to me Carver Santigo, 380 and to be quite honest I wish I wasn’t so impulsive. I absolutely love the layout of this boat as it is the boat I was searching for unfortunately, this was the only boat in the area, and even though I knew it had a host of issues, I was willing to deal with them. Unfortunately, I don’t know a lot about big blocks and it’s been almost 20 years since I’ve owned a boat. I was really trying to find one with diesels or crusaders. Unfortunately, the one I have found had MerCruiser 7.4 L MPI magnums now I really wanted to avoid these motors and I honestly thought they were 330 hp motors which from what I was told were a better motor so I was OK with it now I bought this boat from a dealership in Long Island, which was advertised with 330 hp MerCruiser 7.4 L MPI motors I really wish I could make this short but there’s a whole host of things which I am going to probably make other topics on and ask a bunch of questions so I do apologize in advance. I haven’t had the boat three weeks , they insisted on not fixing the items I had asked for until it was paid in full, then waited to the very last minute to fix the things that I needed to up until the night before I was scheduled to take the boat home to Connecticut I got as far as , the river in which the marina that I belong to is at when I lost the starboard engine. Right now I have the boat getting pulled out of the water and the motor pulled so I can go through it but I really think this boat was going to be a money pit for a while , I’m not sure if I have any recourse as they advertised this boat with the incorrect engines. The surveyor didn’t catch it and listed different engines in the survey and here I am with a Boat with motors I really didn’t want and was advised not to buy this boat if it had these motors .

So I guess I’m wondering what I should do as far as these engines go. It seems that it’s going to be pretty difficult to find remanufactured engines from a reliable source at least that’s what Mike Mechanic says. I know I can’t buy them new, so I’m wondering if I should go to a secondary source to get remanufactured 7.4 L MPI magnums or go carbureted or swap everything out and convert it to a diesel. I really like the idea of converting it to a diesel but I’m not exactly sure what the differences are between a Carver that was a diesel as opposed to when that is a gas. In other words will I need to change the struts? Do I need to change shaft sizes? Do I need to change the transmissions etc. I’m hoping there’s someone in this forum that owns a late 90s early 2000s Carver 380 that came with diesels from the factory as I would like to pick their brain and see exactly what I would need to do to convert it and if it’s even worth it. Again, I do apologize for, the long winded post , Jeff