Little bright spots

Snowbirds of two types.

I've been doing "big jobs" this summer, despite roaring heat and needed, if ambition-thwarting, spells of paying work. Part of the issue is time management: if I know I have four hours free, that's worth setting up for drilling, big crimping, meter work, etc. That's a nice stretch, although in the typical heat aboard the boat under in my as-yet unrestored-with-insulation pilothouse roof, it's also about the limit of what I can do without passing out. I mean, the A/C works fine in the saloon and the aft cabin, but a) I can't always have it running when I am doing electrical work and b) the lack of insulation on the lid largely defeats it.

Today, I had about two hours to spare for boaty things. There's always a myriad of small improvements I've wished to make and many of which I've long since acquired the requisite bits and pieces. One such was a small LED light, picked up for a liquidation price a couple of years back, which I wanted to use for direct, more or less, light on the breaker panels and indirect, dim light for the pilothouse. I'm not talking about a red light for night watches or map-reading, but a low-draw general illumination light. I saw it digging around for some monster switches, and thought...well, it's one more box ticked, isn't it?

Light fantastic.

Unfortunately, I can't do half-assed anymore. Unseen arethe carefully crimped connectors and terminals, lovingly sealed under heat shrink and made with 100% marine-grade tinned wire. I tied this LED fixture in to the cabin light 10 amp breaker, as most of those lights are already low-draw and it would be overkill, even for me, to put this on a breaker. At first, I tied it onto the fuel pump breaker (the white-labelled switch last on the lower panel), but unsurprisingly, the fuel pump induced a rather disco rhythm to the light, which would have been obvious had I not been stunned slightly from the racket of low passing jets during the Air Show (see top photo). 

It was a simple job, but it's satisfying to do simple jobs that don't involve unplugging the shore power to avoid welding.