Underwater Lights!

Testing them out! 

While we were hauled out, we figured we might as well add a couple of underwater lights. It would be great fun for the kids to see all the marine life at night, as well as making it easy to find our boat in a dark and crowded anchorage.

This is a pretty simple DIY project and took about half a day, once we had everything planned out. That took the longest part! We walked around the boat yard looking at the placement of lights on other catamarans. Some had only two at the stern while others had them all around on both the inside and outside of the hulls! Bet those lit up the night like nothing else!

We decided to install two lights, one behind each rudder, as far back as possible, while still being submerged. We originally thought about placing them on the inside of the hull facing inwards, but after talking with other cruisers who were not happy with that placement, we decided to go with aft of the rudder facing downwards.

We marked off the spot aft of the rudder, taped, and pre-drilled the holes, sanded the area, and wiped clean with acetone.

Next, we added sika-flex and fed the wires through. We added a continuous bead of sika-flex to the back of the light and the screwed it to the spot. We then made a seal with some of the sika-flex that squeezed out and covered the screws with it. Each light has one hole drilled which goes into our engine compartment and from there, we ran the wires to  complete the circuit. They are wired to a breaker on our 12v panel.

After they were installed and the sika-flex had dried, we painted the everything with antifouling paint (except the light part, of course). We then pulled off the plastic coating covering the light. We are happy with how they turned out!