Lights Out!

About 6 weeks ago we sailed overnight up from from Scarborough Marina to Double Island Point in order to cross Wide Bay Bar with the morning high tide. A fellow cruiser leaving Mooloolaba later that afternoon, buddy sailed up the coast with us. She commented that our navigation lights seemed feint. Were we separated further than she thought or was there an issue?

COLREGS (international regulations for the avoidance of collisions at sea) mandate that the light array appropriate for your size and type of boat should be visible for at least 2 nautical miles. We turned on our lights and checked they were working but how strongly the lights shone was hard to judge.

Returning recently to Moreton Bay in a single passage commencing from Fraser Island, we sailed into the night to eventually anchor at Peel Island around 1:30am. We were in company with Queenie Grace,  different sailing partners from our last nighttime passage but they hadn’t noticed anything unusual.  It was only when a dusk exodus from one anchorage to another following a storm-front, that another crew noticed our lights were not as bright as those of nearby vessels. Clearly there was something not quite right and our nav lights suddenly become a priority.

At the next opportunity - when the boat was not rocking or rolling, the Bloke investigated. He dismantled the port and starboard navigation lights that are fixed to the bow rails and removed the LED’s to check them. 

Even Blind Freddy could tell something was amiss here. 

The red port lamp was quite apparently compromised. The metal had corroded. Salt water must have got into the fitting. It’s hardly surprising as the bow occasionally takes a ‘greenie’ or dips into a wave. In fact, it was so bad that only a single LED array illuminated!

Both LED bulbs were condemned and the connections in the light fittings on the bow were cleaned with an electrical contact spray.

Luckily, we happened to have a pair of replacement LEDs we were able to substitute immediately, although we had kept the original incandescent globes as ‘spares’ for just such a situation. Our spare parts tub seems to grow year on year! 

We’ll now need to buy some replacements since these 'spares' were intended for our new masthead tri-colour-anchoring light array. Tamar Marine in Launceston, our very most favourite chandlery, will be sending us red and green replacements. Happily we will now be clearly visible at night when out to sea on a black night!