It’s 19° in NY and at least 77° here in Miami. I’m sweltering, But don’t worry about me, I have A/C.
Coming through customs in Nassau, the agent asked me what my purpose of the visit was and I replied, I have about here and she replied, “oh, vacation” and I said, it never occurred to me that this is a vacation and not just a warmer place to work.
I finally finished my lights project. For those of you who may have read of my shenanigans coming down the ICW one night, I decided to go back to my roots. One of the first additions to my first car was changing the headlights to the then banned quartz halogen (Cibie) headlights and I then added two extra lights, a fog and a driving (Baby Oscars). Never could have too much light for those middle of the night drives around Mt. Rainier. If I recall correctly, we could do it in 4 and a half hours from the UW campus and back.
These pictures are not of Mt. Rainier, but of the area between Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens that Julie and I camped in 6 years ago. I loved the logging roads of western Washington and Oregon.
OK. Back to the story.
So Dauntless now has one halogen spot (Hella) and two fog lights (Chinese), with two switches near my right hand below the instrument cluster, going through the switch/breaker in the pilot house panel.
Some details on the lights. The Chinese LED’s are advertised as available in 30 or 60 degree light spread, but I think those numbers looked good to the manufacturer and have no basis in reality. But then that’s what I expected. I actually bought one of each and it looks like the one that is supposed to be 60° had something sprayed on the inside of the lens (to call it a lens is being very generous). In any case, both are very bright (even brighter than expected) and very broad (as expected). The Hella is exactly as advertised. Even on Amazon, they give a great diagram of the
light pattern for each type of light, from spot to driving to euro to fog. I actually got the driving versus the spot, as I can’t see Dauntless going 100 mph (yes, here I do use statute miles, why, because we are on land and our speed is measured in mph), so I don’t really need to see 900 meters down range, 500m will do quite nicely and gives me a bit of a broader beam to catch something let’s say at 200m that my Chinese lights may miss.
And no, I won’t have them on when other boats are around. For some reason I seem to find myself traveling sometimes for days without seeing other boats.
Like when we went to Andros Island and then decided to leave at 10:00 p.m. as I realized what an untenable position I had put us in. OK details to follow in tomorrow’s posting.