Thanks! I fixed it by blanketing the body of water with one invisible sprite that the player can overlap with to change its settings. The water sprites were all separate and snapped to the grid. When the scale was changed on the player it must have been somehow not been overlapping between water sprites even though there was no open space between them.
I tried changing the size of the 'playerbox' in the above eventsheet and the appropriate player sprite at first. Once the player sprite was smaller than the original 16x16 it would no longer become mirrored when moving to the left, it would always stay facing one direction.