Quote:
Originally Posted by bilproject
It would seem that some pontoon boat owners think docking lights are headlights. Saturday night I watched 3 pontoon boats come up from Flashing buoy 3 running with docking lights on all the way till they passed my house by the mail dock on Bear. The last one at 11:30 PM was blasting a stereo and woke us up or I would have never known it was there. Those lights blind other boaters heading toward the offender and it is illegal to be underway with docking lights on. Perhaps this is why the boat was stopped. I see many boats stopped between my house and Shep Browns and in most cases it's out of date registrations, running lights out, clearly overloaded boat, or reckless operation. The MP always run down the boat quickly with lights on and siren if the boat does not respond at once. Nothing different than a police car on land would do. I think they do a great job and by what I see on a weekend I only wish there were more of them. Maybe if they ticketed the large sail boats and cabin cruisers moored in the Gilford area that have 3 year expired registrations they could hire a few more officers. I'm sure the fee for a 35 or 40 foot boat is quite high.
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I see that often on other lakes, can't say I've ever seen it on Winni. I was anchored on a smaller NH lake waiting for some fireworks one night a few years ago and a pontoon came into the area with all lights ablaze. They then positioned themselves so that their docking lights were aimed right at my boat, blinding all of us aboard. A couple of polite requests to turn them off were ignored, so I briefly lit them up with my spot light. That got their attention and in the discussion then ensured I learned that the docking lights and running lights were all wired to one switch... They eventually removed the wire nuts (yup, wire nuts) on the docking lights to get them to extinguish. After the fireworks show, 75% of the boats that left were using their docking lights for travel. Good thing they were all headed the same way.
Edited to add: There was Marine Patrol present in a little aluminum boat the whole time all of this happened. They did not seem to care about the lights and only seemed to be there to prevent stupid drunk tricks, if I had to guess.