- Boating any hour of the day shares the same underlying basics: ensuring that all safety gear is accessible, checking the vessel’s equipment, mechanics, and electronics are operational, and wearing life jackets. If it’s not your daytime habit, attach a whistle and a strobe flashlight to the life jackets (it makes it easier to locate someone who’s gone overboard).
- Check that your running lights work: just turn them on and see! If all the boat’s running lights aren’t working, a fuse or the light switch is likely bad. If one or two lights are out, chances are you have a burnt out bulb (or two), or the contacts between the bulbs and the housing have become corroded.
- Don’t rely on your familiarity with a harbor or waterway. Almost everything is different in the dark. Study the charts for your nighttime route — they show lighting codes and flashing sequences for buoys and beacons and other aids to navigation.
- Laminated guides for recognizing fixed aids and boat lights are available to keep alongside the wheel should you spot an unfamiliar configuration.
- As day turns to night, turn off all unnecessary lights (running lights are necessary to inform other boaters about your presence and direction). Adjust the screen on your electronics to minimize brightness. Put a red filter on your handheld flashlight, use a red filter app for your phone, and a soft red light when looking at your chart or guide — white light messes with night vision.
- Preserve night vision for yourself and other boaters by shining a spotlight across the water only for as long as it takes to locate a buoy or marker and note its heading. Never shine that spotlight towards another vessel.
- Reduce your cruising speed substantially. All available hands should be on deck to act as lookouts; encourage reporting of everything they see and hear.
- Urban light pollution poses a risk to skippers. Enlist a spotter to confirm what you believe is an aid to navigation or advise that it’s a light on the shore.
- Sound carries on the water, but it also bounces around. Learn the sounds and sequences of horn signals, listen to the VHF radio to hear who’s in the vicinity, utilize your radar, and exercise caution as another vessel approaches.
- Keep in mind that other captains are as impeded by the dark as you are. Though you may have the right of way, every boater is required to do all within his or her power to avoid an accident.
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