Help a sailor out with your 240D dipstick?

[MisterSalty]

Hi there! This is my first post.

I recently bought a sailboat that has a Mercedes 240D engine in it. As is usual with sailboats, the engine is installed at a slight angle to align with the propeller shaft. I measured it with an angle protractor: it's around 7.5 degrees. The side with the belts is up higher than the side that connects to the transmission.

I'm trying to figure out whether the dipstick in the engine is stock or whether it was customized to account for the fact that the engine dipstick tube is on the high side of the engine (and thus will always show a lower oil reading than if the engine were level). I suspect the dipstick is stock, and that the previous owner overfilled the oil as a result. The engine has some blowby, and he wound up installing some kind of oil-separator that sits along the crankcase->air intake hose and separates out any oil droplets in the blowback: it drops them into a little plastic soda bottle (welcome to sailboat engineering), which was completely full when I checked it. I'm hoping the large amount of oil in the blowby is at least partly due to him overfilling the oil.

So if someone with a 240D could do the following, it would be a huge help to me:

1) Take your dipstick and measure how long it is from the flange that rests on top of the dipstick tube to the low and the high markings on the dipstick.

2) Go park your 240D somewhere with a 7 degree incline and tell me how much lower the oil level is on your dipstick there versus when your car is flat. I hate to be obsessive, but please try to actually measure the incline and make sure it's not more than 8 degrees. I'd hate to put too little oil in the engine. I'm thinking one could do this pretty simply with a level and an angle protractor: just measure the angle between the level (with the bubble showing flat) and the floor of the car? (or you could measure the angle between the level and the road).

I don't actually know for sure if the oil level affects how much oil splashes around the crankcase and into the blowby, so if I seem to be barking up the wrong tree here, I'd be open to hearing about it.

Thanks a lot!