In Favor of a Second, Lower Anchor Beacon

‘Riding Light’ Raises Question of Compliance Versus Comprehension

Boatshed Neil Feb 2   ∙   Guest post

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Neil Chapman is a lifelong sailor and founder of Boatshed, a U.K. based yacht brokerage with a big difference from its U.S. counterparts. He cruises on a Supertaff, a 1976 Rebel 41 ketch. This story was reprinted with permission from his BoatshedNeil Substack.

There is a moment most sailors recognise. You are anchored for the night, the boat is settled, the water calm enough to reflect points of light.

You glance up from whatever you were doing, perhaps your phone, perhaps a chart or a mug of tea, and you instinctively scan the water ahead. Not the sky. The water. The space where other hulls might be, where a dinghy might be crossing, where a boat might be swinging toward you on a different radius of chain.

What you are looking for, whether you consciously realise it or not, is not brightness. It is meaning.

In most modern anchorages, meaning has become harder to read.

A Short History of a Small Light

Traditionally, anchored vessels displayed what was often called a riding light. Not at the masthead, but forward, low enough to relate visually to the hull, high enough to clear spray and deck clutter, often hung from or near the forestay. It might sit eight or ten feet above the water. It would swing gently as the vessel rode to her anchor.

This was not an affectation. It was practical design shaped by human behaviour. Most close-quarters traffic occurs at eye level. Most collision risk in anchorages is short-range, slow-speed, and human-scale. The riding light sat exactly where approaching eyes were already looking.

Modern yachts, by contrast, tend to rely on a single all-round white anchor light at the masthead. On a 45-foot cruising yacht, that can mean a light 50 feet in the air. Bright, efficient, compliant. Also, in many cases, disconnected from the physical reality of the boat beneath it.

This shift did not happen because someone decided riding lights were bad. It happened because masthead lights were easier to standardise, easier to certify, and easier to sell. One fitting, one wire run, one rule satisfied.

That does not make the outcome either good or bad by default. But it does change how anchorages work as visual systems.

The Anchorage Is Not Offshore

Much of modern navigation equipment, and many modern conventions, are optimised for offshore conditions. There, range matters. Height matters. Visibility over waves matters. A high, bright, all-round light makes sense when vessels are separated by miles and closing speeds are high.

An anchorage is a different environment entirely. It is crowded, slow, irregular, and informal. People move unpredictably. Dinghies weave through larger boats. Heads turn briefly, not deliberately. Attention is fragmented.

In this context, the question is not “can this vessel be seen?” It is “can this situation be read quickly?”

A masthead anchor light answers the first question well. It answers the second less well.

Seen from a dinghy or a cockpit, a masthead light often floats, visually unmoored from the water. Depth cues are weak. It is not always obvious where the hull lies beneath it, or how far away it is. In a field of similar lights, the scene flattens. Everything becomes a constellation rather than a map.

A lower riding light, by contrast, anchors the vessel visually to the water. It gives the eye a reference point that aligns with the way people actually scan their surroundings. It does not shout, but it explains.

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Compliance Versus Comprehension

None of this is an argument against regulations. The collision regulations exist for good reasons, and modern anchor lights are entirely legitimate. The problem is not legality. It is the narrowing of seamanship to compliance alone.

Over time, the incentive structure has shifted. Sailors are rewarded for ticking boxes, not for being readable. If the light meets the rule, the thinking often stops there. Day shapes are not hoisted because nobody looks for them. Nobody looks for them because nobody hoists them. The system decays quietly.

This is not laziness in the moral sense. It is optimisation. People optimise for effort, cost, and perceived risk. In most anchorages, the perceived risk of miscommunication is low, until it isn’t.

The riding light fell out of favour not because it failed, but because it was no longer required.

Tech Fills the Gap, Imperfectly

One might argue that this is all moot. We have AIS, chartplotters, radar, anchor alarms. The boat is visible electronically, even if the light is suboptimal. In many cases, that is true.

But electronics change behaviour as much as they change capability. People rely on screens, sometimes too much. They assume others are doing the same. Visual signalling becomes secondary, a backup rather than a primary language.

That assumption breaks down in precisely the moments when it matters most: fatigue, distraction, unfamiliar waters, visitors in hired boats, guests at the helm, people moving slowly and casually rather than standing a formal watch.

Lights and shapes were designed to work in those moments. They require no battery beyond the one already powering the boat. They require no shared protocol beyond human vision.

Is This a Problem, or Just Change?

This is where the conclusion becomes less clear-cut.

On the one hand, it is hard to argue that modern anchorages are dramatically more dangerous than those of the past. Boats are generally better built, anchors better designed, weather information better distributed. Many incidents are avoided through technology that simply did not exist before.

On the other hand, near-misses are rarely recorded. Confusion, hesitation, and last-second course changes are accepted as normal. The fact that something “usually works out” is not evidence that the system is well designed.

The loss of the riding light is not catastrophic. It is incremental. It makes anchorages slightly harder to read, slightly more ambiguous, slightly more dependent on attention being perfect.

That earns it neither an A nor an F. A C feels about right.

Culture Matters More

Perhaps the most telling observation is not about lights at all, but about mindset.

Vessels that still carry riding lights, hoist anchor balls, or otherwise signal clearly tend to be operated by people who think in terms of shared space. They see anchoring not as parking, but as participating in a system.

This is not about tradition for its own sake. It is about recognising that boats communicate, whether we intend them to or not. The question is whether that communication is clear.

The quiet tragedy is that as practices fade, so does the language to describe them. Many sailors today have never heard the term “riding light.” They are not rejecting the idea. They simply do not know it exists.

When vocabulary disappears, so does choice.

Where This Leaves Us

There is no realistic call to reinstate old rules wholesale. Nor should there be. Boats are diverse, anchorages vary, and one size rarely fits all.

But there is room for better thinking.

Anchor lights could be designed with anchorage contexts in mind: adjustable brightness, secondary lower references, warmer colour temperatures. Education could place more emphasis on readability rather than mere visibility. Day shapes could be treated as meaningful again, not ceremonial.

Most of all, sailors could be encouraged to ask a simple question when anchoring for the night:

“If someone looks up for one second, will they understand where I am?”

Sometimes the masthead light is enough. Sometimes it isn’t.

The riding light was one answer to that question. Not a perfect one, but a thoughtful one. Losing it without replacing the thinking behind it feels like a missed opportunity.

Not a disaster. Just a quiet downgrade.

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