I don't know what gives,

I have respawn 10x and each time, I turn off moats, and start own team and vary the distance from New Player, and it just continues to spawn me in the middle of the water.

Any ideas? Am I missing something.

When you say "in the middle of water"? You mean like your spawn area generates correctly but you're in the middle of a large lake/ocean? Or like your character is stuck in water and there is no spawn generated?

The moat option only adds a few tiles of water around a base.

If the spawn is generating correctly, but you're in a lake, there's no way for me to fix that with how the mod works right now because positions are chosen randomly. Before generating the chunks, there's isn't an easy way to know if the area is in a large body of water or not. The chances to spawn in water will go up significantly depending on your map settings too, more water means more chances for starting in water.

A quick way to regen your spawn is to use the command /oarc-reroll-spawn

That will let you retry finding a new spawn quickly without having to reset your player.