Rollover trouble

I’ve got an if function that calculates the mouse’s movement inside a tiny movie clip and causes the y value of a separate movie clip to decrease by increments of 5, when the mouse is outside of the box the movie clip increases by 3. Here is my problem:

Flash does not recognize when the water clip’s y value changes on rollover. I know this is the case because I used the trace function to monitor the water movie clip’s y value. Is there a way I can have the rollover return the y value? All I need flash to do is gotoAndPlay(2); when the water’s clip is <=610. I’ve been staring at this for a while now and I have no idea what is going on anymore. Thanks for all your help.
Mike
whoever helps me with this gets this tasty carrot