Quote:
Piers wrote:
How do you cope with night boating?
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Up here with all the debris in the water--- mostly big logs that have escaped from log booms or come down the rivers, some on the surface, some floating vertically with just their tops touching the surface, plus huge kelp an eel grass mats, and various piece of floating lumber ranging from a part of a board to a part of a shed--- running at night in the typical recreational boat tends to be avoided.* The farther north you go the worse this debris can get.* A lot of this stuff is hard enough to see during the day depending on the lighting, and a night-vision system would probably not be of much value, especially if the water was at all rough.* Radar can pick up some of the crab pot buoys if the water is very calm because most of them have large metal fender washers as part of the float hardware.* But for each one they do paint there are plenty that they don't paint, so radar's not a reliable avoidance method.
We have floodlights that can be mounted in the jackstaff mount above the bow pulpit and plugged into waterproof 12vdc outlet in the side of the cabin to illuminate things that show up directly in front of us, but even then I wouldn't trust it to show us everything.* So we don't run at night although we have gotten caught out a couple of times and had to run the last few miles across Bellingham Bay (a hotbed of crab pot buoys and logs that come down the Nisqually River) and it is not much fun.
The commercial fishboats up here are built to withstand the collisions with all this stuff and many of them run at night with their forward flood lights on.
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