It turns out that Rigid had some quality issues with their first batch of marine LED spotlights, so ours have been replaced. This gave us the opportunity to change from the Rigid spots to floodlight design, as our initial testing indicated we wanted more light in close to the bow, and there was sufficient throw to be useful in lighting up an anchorage shoreline.

We’ve got two lights aimed sideways a bit, with the aft edge of their light cones at right angles to our centerline. The rest, as you can see above, are aimed more or less on center or just a hair off.

These are exceptionally bright, and we will need to take care not to use them when they might be pointed at a nearby vessel. But we expect them to be particularly useful in judging sea state in the dark and picking out floating obstacles close in. One of the features we like is a sharp cut off of the light beam, so that they can be precisely aimed, keeping the reflections on our anchoring gear minimized.

Speaking of lights, we’ve just had a new moon, and conditions were clear enough to tempt us ashore with camera and tripod at 0400.

At the same time there was a magnetic storm a-blowing to the north, and if you look carefully you will see what we think is a hint of the aurora borealis. We are alerted to solar details these days via a cool (and free) iPad app called 3D Sun.

Since we are on the subject of lighting, which brings up the sun, we’ll close with the image above from last month, taken from our deck while hauled out at Triton Marine, with Venus transiting the sun. This was a lucky shot given the fact that the sky had been totally overcast, but partially cleared at the critical moment.

We’ll have lots of details on things nautical in the next week, as we are wrapping up a series of experiments with air conditioning, the exhaust system, and chasing/reducing engine vibration. It has been an interesting few weeks.