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Gary,

Your motor is mounted all the way down because that is how it was done in the mid 1970s.

It is hard to get folks to understand how much time has passed and how much better outboard propellers have become. In the mid 1970s there were only (for all practical purposes) aluminum propellers for use on small outboard powered boats. The first commercially successful stainless steel propeller had just been introduced by OMC (the SST) and it was an early design that had only very modest cupping.

With these old fashioned aluminum props. the cavitation (AV) plate needed to be fully submerged so the motors were installed as low as they could go.

Many smaller outboards did no have an power trim either so one trim setting was all you got unless you wanted to manually move the tilt pin and even then you only had four or five choices.

By the 1980s the OMC SST had shown the benefits of the stainless steel propeller, but they were expensive so not many folks adopted them. Dealers were set in t heir way and they just continued to mount the motors as low as possible. This continues today with old mechanics who just never figured out how to correctly set up a motor with the right prop.

In your case you have the unique problem of covering your drain tube. You have to have a working drain tube so you will either add a new one, space your motor back from the transom with jack plate, or modify your motor to allow water to drain form the exiting drain tube.

No matter what you do, I recommend you actually use your boat the way it is rigged now so you can better appreciate how much improvement can be had by raising the motor next year and installing an appropriate stainless steel propeller.