When we had the mast down to be refinished, we discovered that our old lights were in pretty bad shape. So we figured we might as well replace them and convert to LED at the same time.
I wanted to have a tri-color/anchor light combo, and this meant we need to run new wire as well. I ended up replacing all of the in-mast wiring and create a new terminal block as the base of the mast to terminate everything.
At the panel, I also had to do some rewiring. The regulation say you can use the bow/stern lights or the tri-color while sailing, but not both. But for motoring, you can only use the lower bow/stern along with the steaming light. I created two switches on the panel. One for “sailing” and one for “steaming”. Now we select one or the other, but not both.
Since we want the compass light on if either sailing or steaming, I had to use some diodes. See the compass light article for more details.
