Running at night - chop the throttles back. With many of today's boats, capable of running highway speeds......without any brakes or forward headlights = heavy chances.
Disabled boats, and or kayaks, deadheads in the water.....all pose serious risk. And you can't see any of it till you are literally right on top of it.
Night vision - it takes roughly 20-30 minutes of no artificial lights on pupils before you truly have night time vision. Electronics - you lose the night vision by huge percentages, glancing at the screen.
I run with a hand held Q-Beam handy and scan periodically - like a tug skipper pushing down the ICW and I don't run hard and fast. Even though I can run pretty shallow, on navigable sections of the ICW and or other main nav channels, I run off the shorelines at night. You never know if someone anchored or poled down, jumped out and started wading that channel edge, with no lights. And considering the big girls love to feed and breed at night, along those shallow to deep channel edges and spoil islands, many wade anglers fish these edges. And considering today's boats, designed to run skinny water, many operators run shallow because their boats can. All good in sunlight - night time, get out in the main channel. Too many unknown variables running skinny with no vis.
When I sailed at sea, nights aboard ship, were most particularly nerve wracking. We went out of our way to not screw up our night vision. Even lighting cigarettes, one guy had a cig burning, we lit our cigs from that guys cig - to eliminate the lighter flash. All lights - were dim red. Radar and nav gear - green with scope shields - which eliminates light side scatter. One had to place their entire face down into the shield to see the screen.
The marine environment is dangerous enough in daylight, factor over half more, running at night.
Disabled boats, and or kayaks, deadheads in the water.....all pose serious risk. And you can't see any of it till you are literally right on top of it.
Night vision - it takes roughly 20-30 minutes of no artificial lights on pupils before you truly have night time vision. Electronics - you lose the night vision by huge percentages, glancing at the screen.
I run with a hand held Q-Beam handy and scan periodically - like a tug skipper pushing down the ICW and I don't run hard and fast. Even though I can run pretty shallow, on navigable sections of the ICW and or other main nav channels, I run off the shorelines at night. You never know if someone anchored or poled down, jumped out and started wading that channel edge, with no lights. And considering the big girls love to feed and breed at night, along those shallow to deep channel edges and spoil islands, many wade anglers fish these edges. And considering today's boats, designed to run skinny water, many operators run shallow because their boats can. All good in sunlight - night time, get out in the main channel. Too many unknown variables running skinny with no vis.
When I sailed at sea, nights aboard ship, were most particularly nerve wracking. We went out of our way to not screw up our night vision. Even lighting cigarettes, one guy had a cig burning, we lit our cigs from that guys cig - to eliminate the lighter flash. All lights - were dim red. Radar and nav gear - green with scope shields - which eliminates light side scatter. One had to place their entire face down into the shield to see the screen.
The marine environment is dangerous enough in daylight, factor over half more, running at night.
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