Crusty Chief
Guru
Kevin,
One thing we did to increase being seen was to add solar landscape lights around the boat. We picked up a box of six and put them in the rod holders around the boat when at anchor, but moved them behind the pilot house while underway at night. This really helped once south of the US border. AIS doesn’t work very well once you cross the border going south. Many times we wouldn’t get a signal until we were within a few miles of a transmitting boat, primarily small craft like us. The big commercial boats gave us plenty of time to take appropriate action, and that was our biggest concern. You’ll come across plenty of Pangas that dont even show up on radar or any running lights until your almost on top of them. But because we were lit up like a Christmas tree, almost always they would shine a flashlight towards us, thankfully they had flashlights. This is especially important with the long liners as they use black bouys with no lights to mark there sets. We saw plenty of 25-30 ft pangas 40+ miles offshore.
I’m sure some will say we were violating navigation rules of the road with the extra lights but we never had an issue from any officials. We did get calls on the VHF asking us what type of vessel we were, as they didn’t recognize the reason for the lights, and they didn’t have AIS,
Just a suggestion.
One thing we did to increase being seen was to add solar landscape lights around the boat. We picked up a box of six and put them in the rod holders around the boat when at anchor, but moved them behind the pilot house while underway at night. This really helped once south of the US border. AIS doesn’t work very well once you cross the border going south. Many times we wouldn’t get a signal until we were within a few miles of a transmitting boat, primarily small craft like us. The big commercial boats gave us plenty of time to take appropriate action, and that was our biggest concern. You’ll come across plenty of Pangas that dont even show up on radar or any running lights until your almost on top of them. But because we were lit up like a Christmas tree, almost always they would shine a flashlight towards us, thankfully they had flashlights. This is especially important with the long liners as they use black bouys with no lights to mark there sets. We saw plenty of 25-30 ft pangas 40+ miles offshore.
I’m sure some will say we were violating navigation rules of the road with the extra lights but we never had an issue from any officials. We did get calls on the VHF asking us what type of vessel we were, as they didn’t recognize the reason for the lights, and they didn’t have AIS,
Just a suggestion.