I'm stumped and would appreciate some help, or even ideas of what to try next. I haven't worked on engines for several years, but once upon a time I had a general clue about them.

The car is my sons, it's a performance enhanced 350 in a cutlass. Fairly old school stuff, just a carburated 350, no computer or anything. It wasn't running great the past 2 weeks, nothing bad, but would miss at high RPMs. 2 days ago he ran it in some heavy rain and hit some deep puddles. The car quit, refired a few times but quickly quit again.

I went to look at it, lots of water on the engine, a puddle on the manifold, air cleaner was very wet etc. Removed air cleaner and it fired a few times and would run if I kept the RPMs up at 2k or so, it ran very rough with lots of white smoke from the exhaust. After a few times it quit starting.

It had spark initially, but then it went away. The distributor had water inside, replaced the cap, the coil (HEI) the module and the capaciter the module plugs into. (basically everything electrical I could replace was replaced) Now we have spark again.

The plugs were replaced, the old ones looked pretty bad, oily. The engine was spun over several times with the plugs removed, I was told water came from the plug holes. I wasn't there to see the details.

It's appears to be getting fuel, and we tried some starter fliud as well just to be able to identify or eliminate fuel as the problem.

The timing is gear driven, not a chain, leading me to not anticipate it being a skipped tooth or anything.

I would apprecaite some ideas of what to try next,
thankyou
Mykle