Duck boat lights...20 years in the making....
After 20 years of trial and error I'm finally zeroing in on a light set-up I'm happy with. All the lights are LED so the total light load is around 7A when on battery and a little higher when the motor is running.
The navigation lights are LED strips that fit perfectly in a slot under the gunnel. I am very happy with this nav set-up since it doesn't get in the way, I don't have to remove it and, since it's below the gunnel, it doesn't hurt my night vision. The anchor light is still a plug in stick but I replaced the incandecent bulb with a LED replacement.
I have a 72 LED Watt "driving light" that is removable. It has a 36 Watt spot beam and a 36 watt flood beam that I control separately. I've found that the spot beam works best when I running the river at speed. The flood beam has too much side light and just amplifies even light fog.
The flood beam is best when I'm slowly navigating in tight conditions with obstructions. In these conditions the spot beam is so bright that if it hits a stump or limb it will burn the image in my eyes for a few seconds.
The driving light is made removable with a pair of 1" Ram Mounts and an Attwood 3-wire trolling motor plug. Keep in mind that the Attwood plug is designed for a ground, a 12VDC and a 24VDC feed so the way I rig it with a ground, a switched 12VDC and a second switched 12VDC feeds is astandard. When I get where I'm going in the morning I unplug it, take off the lower Ram Mount, and wrap the wires around the body of the light. I made a camo cover from an old pair of waders. The cover and the wrapped wires are held tight by the kayak bungee that built fixed on the upper RAM Mount - you can see it in the picture.
I haven't used it for anything else but I could get a second plug and use the connector at the front of the boat to run up to two switched supplies. The switches and wiring is rated for up to 20 amps each.
Switch space is limited so the big light and the nav/anchor lights are operated by two DPDT switches. The nav lights are on when the front switch is up. When it's down the front switch operates the nav lights and the spot beam. The middle switch, up is anchor light and down is anchor and flood lights.
I also have a pair of Garmin units; a 43cv and a 44cv - one has freshwater lakes and the other has coastal NOAA charts. These units have the same mount and transducer so I just plug-in whichever covers the area I'm hunting. They are combo fish finder and GPS chartplotters built in so I always have a track and a read on water depth. With the lights and GPS units I am not intimidated about hunt new areas - it's actually why I ended up with this rigging. I use the second transducer and mounting station on my fishing boat as a back-up to the side-view Garmin.
The unused mount is for a back-up handheld GPS that I can power with the dual (2 x 2.1A) USB plug on the face of the switchbox. I have it as a back-up or if I'm boating into an area but intend to walk in further.
The white lights on the front and sides are operated together when the third switch is in the down position. (Up is manual bilge pump).
These are lower intensity LED lights that I use when putting out decoys. They light up everything on the front and sides of the boat and I could use them in a pinch if I ever need to get home in the dark but don't have the removable light with me. They are also handy at dark landings.
A couple of the design parameres are that 1) I have zero sense of direction, 2) my night vision gets worse every year, and 3) I will hunt a landing and a spot that I've never seen in the daylight so I need good lights and electronics. I am very considerate using big lights with other boats on the water. If I've ever shined you it was either not me or a total accident.
Just thought I'd share and I'm open to suggestions. Let me know if you want any more details - I'm pretty happy with this set-up but there's aways room for thoughtful tweaking.
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Originally Posted by theoldblackdog
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