Just got back from a month overseas and figured i'd use the lovely weather today as an excuse to get out there for awhile and warm everything up prior to changing the motor oil. Unfortunately my starboard dipstick looks like this:
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What's my best coarse of action right now? Haven't yet been able to reach Dave Govatos who originally built them for advice. My (car) mechanic buddy says "its just some condensation, burn it off" but i've never seen the slightest bit of milkshake before so I'm not so sure of that.

What should I do next? Anything i can do right now, today? The boat is on a lift behind my house and I dont have a trailer or tow vehicle so pulling it and driving over to the marina isn't an option.

Appreciate any advice here.

Whatever you do I wouldn't leave it that way. Winter is coming.
You can always try changing the oil but I have never have it help. Also if you have milkshake oil that is not just a leak. The motor has been run with water in the oil. Now its everywhere.

Yes definitely not. Im just wondering what i can do TODAY. A few specific questions:
-Should I start it to warm the oil so i can drain it easier?
-Should I start by changing it with cheap oil, (expecting I'm going to have to do it multiple times)?
-Its been 5 weeks since i last ran it, is that really bad news considering the water thats been in there and resulting corrosion?

Hopefully I can reach Dave tomorrow, but if there's anything i can do right now I will.

Update: i drained the oil cold (it took hours with the suction pump through the dipstick port) and it looks completely normal end of season oil. I did notice that when i pulled the suction tube out of the dipstick port, there is some milkshake residue on it. What do you folks think, just some condensation in the port?
What do the old salts think? Thanks.
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I would say so u good to good ,,run some new oil thru her and see,,,

Had one look that way years ago that was with a crower 108 lsa cam. I'd run the boat hard to attempt to burn off the condensation but would have difficult time getting temps over 200 deg in cold water. Underside of valve covers were bad also. Mine was understandable considering it was learning days reversion but seems as of recent we've been seeing a lot of this on OSO. So back to what is causing your problem? Good luck and keep us posted.

Condensation

Even if you change the oil you need to clean the dipstick tube otherwise you'll keep pulling up sludge even if the oil is clean. The fact that only one engine is sludgy sorta points to a problem. When I got milkshake from a popped head gasket I put in some cheap oil, sprayed WD40 down the dipstick tube, put about a cup of diesel fuel in the oil to grab the water out of it, got it to operating temp on the hose, and drained it and replaced it with good oil and filter. I put about 20 minutes on it at the lake and redid the oil again but I was fixing a different problem.

One way to confirm if it was a milkshake is checking the oil filter. If you truly have a milkshake the filter will be sludgy. If it looks like normal oil then it's most likely just condensation. Sounds like a good time for a compression test etc for further peace of mind.

I did empty out the filter and the oil looked normal, so that sounds good. Never did a compression test myself before but now is a good time to learn and should be able to sometime in the next week or so. Before that I'll clean out the tube and run the cheap oil (possibly with diesel, i'll check with Dave just to be sure since he built em), fill it up again with Mobil 1 and report. Thanks Baja and everyone else who chimed in.

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