Wayne.B wrote in message . ..
On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 09:57:17 -0500, "Bryan" wrote:
You might consider laying off shore till morning or trying to time your
arrival for daylight. I won't go in at night unless I've been there during
the day and am familiar with the harbor.

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That's good advice for a tricky entrance or a poorly equipped boat.
With good electronic charting and/or radar it's usually not that
difficult however. One of the problems in many inlets however is that
the buoys are not charted because of constant change to the channel.
That's definitely a reason to wait for daylight in my opinion.

The biggest problem I saw on this little night sailing excercise
was the unlighted buoys. Two of them, I only saw when I was abeam of
them and two I never did see. Running into these markers is the
biggest hazard on a night like that. The reflective coating must be
faded from the sun so they just do not show up until fairly close.
Furhtermore, there is some discrepancy between what the charts say and
some markers. There is also a recent uncharted shrimpboat wreck at
the west end of the island that is partway into the channel thazt I
was never able to spotlight on the way in.
The excercise was good in exposing a couple of small problems and
bringing back some old skills. For example, I did not have a small
flashlight for taking a quick peak at the chart so I was blinded for
about 30 secs after every time I looked at it. In the day, I
obsessively rely on my handbearing compass to take bearings which
enables me to go on a course till a bearing is presented to something
which will clear all obstacles. My hand compass is not lighted and it
would have blinded me to take such a bearing so I used the GPS. I
completely forgot about simply pointing the boat at the object in
question and using the dimly lighted boat compass.