Chip & Debbie Willis on s\v Elegant'sea: Overnight lighting while on watch - upgrades

Wow what a pain this turned out to be!😕 We decided we really did not have enough comfortable lighting for the galley area when standing watch at night.
When the weather is good and the boat is steady enough which happens on a lot of our overnighters as we plan weather very painstakingly. We like to be comfortable and are never on a schedule. We plan usually two anchorages at a time.
We tried a new watch schedule and it worked good. We will use it on our next overnighter which will be around Cabo Corrientes (Cape of Currents) on the way south. This enables Debbie to go to the state room and sleep from 1 AM to the morning un-interrupted. As any Captain, she usually gets up once or soo to check on things but gets to get good sleep. (Debbie doe not nap well like me.)
Before we would sleep in the settee or salon and take shorter watches, the galley lights would be too much then and it was a head lamp thing most of the time. We have a lee cloth for the settee if we get bamboozled by the weather😓

February 2018 - Currently in MarinaVallarta, Banderas Bay Mexico ( Puerto Vallarta Jalisco)

There are two dome lights under the stove hood. The stove hood is SS and the wiring to them is between the hood and the headliner. The SS hood is held on by about a zillion small SS screws going through the headliner and into the wood\fiberglass or whatever is there. That seemed like a lot to go wrong taking out all those screws etc. Instead I removed the existing dome light. It had one screw\bolt in the middle and possibly a nut on the end but we will never know. This was a real pain getting out as it started to just spin and of course you are working on your head in a tight space. But we prevailed!

The first idea was to remove the old dome light. The dome lights under the galley hood we had upgraded to LED years ago. They work great but are only white. We never thought about the standing watch needs at the time. We do use head lamps that have RED led lights at night but it just nicer to look into the galley and see without slipping on the headlam over\under the stocking cap or headphones etc. At least we have found it so.

At first we were going to use 3M 4000 UV Marine Adhesive to attach the new\used dome light to the SS hood but later decided that was a bad idea. We were able to drill two new SS screw holes for the light to get mounted up under the hood and use the existing wiring. Of course this is a swap meet item so the dome needed some tape to hold it on good which you do not see normally when in use or otherwise. In fact, that is one of the reasons we started this is "oh we got this light at the swap meet lets put it here" thing.😣 Now we are really glad we replaced this one and will do the other when found at the next swap meet, no only kidding. We will order a new one as they are really reasonablee now and put the other side on the project list. We could really use a bit more red light light in the area.

The old dome light that still needs updating to red\white. It is original, with a white LED upgraded bulb in it.

New LED dome light with red\white light and it fits better than the original under the hood also.

At night. This shows the red LED over the refer lids, the red LED under the SS stove hood and the deck LED courtesy light. Replacing the one other dome light will do it.

We had a Imtra accent light we were using as a counter top light that replaced an old refer thermostat that the PO (previous owner) had installed. It burnt out so we rebuilt it with a red inexpensive led courtesy light we purchased.