Navigation lights

A sailing dinghy is by nature a day boat, but it is not uncommon for the sun to set before you reach your destination. Then you need some sort of navigation lights. Various options are discussed at greater length on another page.

Because on our latitudes summer days are long and light even until the end of August, need for navigation lights is rather minor. As such, it doesn’t feel reasonable to build a fixed electric system with all its complexities, like watertightness, bushings, charging, ventilation and corrosion. The setting would change if you want to do night sailing or want to install some other electric devices, such as a marine VHF radio, echo sounder, chart plotter or AIS transponder. For such needs I would have built the electric system around LiFePO4 battery which is both stable and lightweight.

As Merisirri follows the keep it simple principle the navigation lights are simple portable Navisafe LED lights. They run on standard AAA batteries or a little less common rechargeable 1.5 V batteries. They are mounted on the hull of the boat by means of portable modules made of plywood. The related product details are below. The first table column has Navisafe’s model number, and the values in Duration column are estimates.

Navisafe tricolor light is introduced in the following video.