Sea faring unit problems

We are working on a sea battle map. We are having problems dealing with unit funtions combined with that type of enviroment.

Problem 1) There are no nonflying units that can go over deep watter. We tried hover but that didnt work. We want all ships to be based on heroes so we can use items to upgrade the ship and carry cargo. Since we cannot get heroes to fly using a flying unit as the base unit wont work. Also a flying unit would be able to go over land and we dont want that either. We are using shalow watter right now but dont like that you can see the terrain under it. Yes we can change the tile art to dark blue but we want to use watter depth as a movement restriction. Not to mention smooth terrain looks much better than islands surrounded by all cliffs.

Problem 2) Assuming there is no way to fix problem 1 we made all islands have cliffs to prevent ships from going over land. We want to use load and unload on ships to transport ground units from island to island. The cliffs prevent both the load and unload from working. We tried to use triggers to force the ordering unit to unload all units at thier current location and instant move them to the targeted point. We are experimenting with it but havent got it to work. In addition we dont want ground units to be able to be unloaded in the middle of the watter. Havent started working on that since we couldnt get the unload function to work right.

Problem 3) When a unit attacks it points the front of the unit at the target and then shoots. We want ships to only attack braodside. Is there a way to change the direction a unit fires from. If so how would we set up a fire arc for both sides of the ship but not the front and back?