Light Her Up Boys

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.

Mt. Adams Summer 2008

Getting ready for dinner before the Sasquatch made his presence known.
Getting ready for dinner before the Sasquatch made his presence known.

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 
Lights 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.

Author: Richard on Dauntless

I’m an eclectic person, who grew up in New York, lived overseas for many years and have a boat, Dauntless, a 42 foot Kadey Krogen trawler yacht. Dauntless enables me to not only live in many different parts of the world, but to do it in a way that is interesting, affordable, with the added spice of a challenge. Dauntless also allows me to be in touch with nature. As the boat glides through the ocean, you have a sense of being part of a living organism. When dolphins come to frolic, they stay longer if you are out there talking to them, watching them. Birds come by, sometimes looking for a handout; sometimes grateful to find a respite from their long journey. I grew up on the New York waterfront, in the West Village, when everything west of Hudson St. was related to shipping and cargo from around the world. For a kid, it was an exciting place of warehouses, trucks, and working boats of all kinds: tugs and the barges and ships, cargo and passenger, they were pushing around. My father was an electrical engineer, my mother an intellectual, I fell in between. I have always been attracted to Earth’s natural processes, the physical sciences. I was in 8th grade when I decided to be a Meteorologist. After my career in meteorology, my natural interest in earth sciences: geology, astronomy, geography, earth history, made it a natural for me to become a science teacher in New York City, when I moved back to the Big Apple. Teaching led to becoming a high school principal to have the power to truly help kids learn and to be successful not only in school but in life. Dauntless is in western Europe now. In May and June, I will be wrapping up the last two years in northern Europe, heading south to spend the rest of the year in Spain & Portugal. Long term, I’m planning on returning to North American in the fall of 2017 and from there continuing to head west until we’re in Northeast Asia, Japan and South Korea, where we will settle for a bit. But now, my future lies not in NY or even Europe, but back to the water, where at night, when the winds die down, there is no noise, only the silence of the universe. I feel like I am at home, finally.

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