I was on a bike light suggestion. Bt40 flood light.
2 lights is good, i mentioned that before, it provides redundancy as well. Only thing is that if he wants to stick to the budget, these 2 lights need to be mid-range budgetlights.
A headlight might not be suitable in this case, as he needs to hit just a little over 100 yards. I’ll give it till 200 yards. But I don’t think a 500-1000 yards extreme thrower is needed.
I have not looked at headlights in detail, but i don’t think many of them go past 20k cd.
200 yards means like approx 50k cd and not less, maybe 100k cd if it feels better for ya (Sofirn Q8). One of the requirements on the first post is also enough lumens, and i agree with that coz one thing i don’t like is laser-beam illumination which is not useful especially when mounted on a kayak. If it’s mounted on a fixed tripod + bino use in a flashaholic setting then that’s different. I personally prefer using the advertised ANSI throw distance divided by 2 or even 3.
That’d mean decent illumination at the target, not something that you might need to have perfect low-light adapted vision + maybe a pair of binoculars with 50mm objective lens for assistance or something. 
I tested it out for ya, a BLF Q8 is able to illuminate stuff about 1.5 yards/metres from you out to about 5 yards/meters. The hotspot is not going to be hitting the water/ground at 10-15 metres/yards, and possibly farther than that. This is with the light perfectly horizontally to the ground and mounted at 1-2 feet height. I suppose with your type of lake/creek kayaking, waves making the kayak blob up and down is a non-issue (anyway, even a tight aspheric beam’s lightspot would hit the water if there are moderate waves).
With the Sofirn Q8, you are going to get a hotspot that is half the size, hotter hotspot, around the same lumens. You can tune it down of course, there is infinite ramping.
L6 - a wee bit slightly smaller hotspot than the Sofirn Q8. L6 has no tripod screw mount, but OP said he can clamp mount it.
If you still want a little more lumens and throw from the Q8s, you can check out the Sofirn Q8 and BLF Q8 threads. Many managed to bump up the performance of the BLF Q8s by 20% no issue at all. Someone managed to squeeze out 6.5k lumens somewhat easily from his Sofirn Q8 in the Sofirn Q8 thread. You probably can do that too with the BLF Q8 with just low internal resistance cells like Sony VTC 6 and maybe 16 to 18 ga wires as spring bypass. But in any case, the stock lights are already quite good to run.
VTC5A is even slightly better with a bit higher current delivery and lower internal resistance but you’d take a bit of a capacity hit (VTC5A 2600mAh and VTC6 3000mAh)
The L6’s output probably also gets bumped a little with such a simple mod, but probably not as much, i think most if not all stock lights already have bypasses.
Exactly what I was thinking guys! Everything I’ve seen from the warm lights shows it cutting through fog and atmosphere better…the blue lights are cloudier.
That’s my thinking too…bigger lights are probably overkill for my needs, BUT I’ll get longer run times at low to mid range, even high if I need it and it won’t give the heat like turbo mode would.
Yeah probably 3-5 meters in my line of vision…just to know if I’d have to portage over a log or blow down or if I can push over it. I have a Fenix TK22 and when I mount it to the very front it does ok, but I want something better. So yeah, like you said the key is I want to keep the hot spot off the water and let the outside illumination of the light make the water visible. I’ve watched hours and hours of reviews but it’s hard to see what it would look like wrt to my needs. I’m really thinking of buying several to try out and I can keep some and give the others to my dad and father in law.
Which Nitecores do you think would work? I looked at the TM26gt and the TM28. They are more expensive though
I am not from a country in which we experience foggy conditions, but be very careful on the yellow/amber lights bandwagon. I am not a pro on this so you might wanna google it up in more detail, but i believe yellow/amber does not really “land more lux” on target. Maybe i am wrong, i don’t know……. shrugs
What i have read is that yellow improves definition.
Sofirn Q8 guns out 100k cd. BLF Q8 50k. Around that ballpark.
The Sofirn Q8 would probably stilll land more lux on target, even at 6000-7000k, vs BLF Q8 5000k. Anyway, 5000k is still not really yellow.
But with that said, you ought to be pretty ok with both lights, at 50k or 100k cd.
Yeah a headlight doesn’t work as it reflects off my paddle and arms while I’m paddling killing my vision. The bikelights some one mentioned above I didn’t care for either…they are really floody and need more lumens to work well I think. The BC30 I tried has to be on the highest setting I think for it to work.
I don’t think I’d need 200 yards throw…I mean it would be nice, but 100 would be plenty
Awesome! Thank you! I might pickup the Sofirn Q8 to compare and gift the one I don’t use. Waves shouldn’t be a factor as I’m always on calm water.
Quick google : Some professor’s (Dr. Lawrence D. Woolf) take on yellow or longer wavelengths on fog penetration.
Summary : It probably isn’t true that yellow increases penetration.
With that said, really need to get some real life lux meter readings @ say 200m with a 3000K and a 6500K light in foggy conditions. In addition to user’s ease of target acquisition + target definition.
edit - but don’t take my statements wrongly. Yellow fog lights could still be seen by other drivers better than headlights, mainly coz of beam pattern cut-offs and/or colour that kinda thingy. And if you are going to switch on both HID/LED headlamps + extra set of foglights, then yes.
It’s something like our hobby’s Aspheric lens crowd vs Reflector lens crowd for throw. Fog lamps have much more defined throwy beam patterns.
As for reflected glare of the beam through the air back to the user of a 3000K beam vs a 6500K beam, i really don’t know. The scattering effect theory is said to be used wrongly in this case. It might be due to eye fatigue or perceived glare or something, but i believe the effect is relatively small for 5000K and 6500K.
@2100, there’s another reason cooler tinted lights perform worse under non-deal conditions: glare.
Cooled tinted light sources emit more glare than warmer tinted light sources, meaning under the same throw conditions, the cooler light will have more glare, and will spread out more, resulting in less clarity.
Also, we have to speak about diffused reflection. This happens when the intricacies of the surface, be it water droplets or the floor, are bigger than the wavelength of light emitted, there will be will be light diffusion across the atmosphere. With shorter wavelength light, and therefore cooler light, there will be more light diffusion across the atmosphere compared to warmer light sources.
What the professor is absolutely true. Redder sources of light don’t cut through the fog better. It’s just that bluer light sources diffuse more in the atmosphere.
That was my explanation anyway.
Might be true, it’s quite interesting actually. Thanks for pointing that out and i shall go google and see if there are any scientific tests done on this regarding the end-user end with regards to reflected light/glare. I’m not an expert on this.
Not sure if i was reading the professor’s mini write-up correctly, the reflected glare/diffusion due to Rayleigh scattering has been wrongly used? (or is my science / comprehension incorrect). Is this back-scattering (back to the user) or is it front scattering? Since he hinted as there is no rayleigh scattering effect, does this mean that it doesn’t matter at the end-user end as well?
In any case, 5000K vs 6500K, i think effects are going to be relatively benign. If it’s 2700K vs 6500K, then yeah the CCT difference is really there. But BLF Q8 vs Sofirn Q8 is 50k vs 100k cd, that’s pretty big (though of course you’d need 4X the cd to double distance). In any case, both lights more than satisfy OP’s 100 yard requirement.
What the professor is saying is 100% correct. I just added additional facts
I see, i understand what you mean, i’ll just check out on the diffusion aspect as well.
My apologies - just being a bit on the flashaholic side today. Usually i am not that anal. lol 
Man ya’ll are thorough haha. I should have stopped and thought about it…1000-1500k is not a huge difference. But you’re right on the cd’s….the ol inverse square law…luckily I use that in my job so that makes sense LOL. That’d be what 1/2 of a stop of light? That’s not a huge difference numerically.
I may pick up the Sofirn and test it too.
Do you guys now how the BLF and Sofirn Q8’s will compare to the Astrolux MF01 and maybe the Fenix FD65?
Quite interesting……again i must reiterate that i am not superbly science literate so i might be mistaken.
I believe Rayleigh scattering part is quite proven.
Rayleigh scattering works for water molecues in the air (the sky looks blue). Fog particles have particle diameters which are too big to be affected by this. It is not dependent on light wavelengths, red/amber is basically 600 - 700nm, blue/voilet is 400nm to 460nm? 700nm is 0.0007mm, or 0.7 microns. Mean distribution for fog/cloud droplet diameters = 10-15 microns.
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/lights/light_color/light_color.html
There is this thing called Mie scattering as well, applicable to particle sizes larger than the light’s wavelengths. But still, it is NOT back scattering, as it has a big frontal lobe in the direction of the light. You see this in nature with that white glare around sun. However, i suspect this STILL has a bit of effect in terms of back scattering, and it is still not strongly dependent on light wavelength.
So CW/NW/even Warm White should not make a difference in terms of Mie scattering reflected light even if we are talking about back-scatter or from the user’s POV. Look at the small reflected arrows against the direction of the light source, ie reflected back to the user.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html
So is WW or CW lights more affected by *back *scattering in a cloud/fog? Maybe i might need to go google aviation stuff but i am not finding out a lot.
But other than ground fog, we also can take lower altitude and cumulus white clouds in the sky as an example, sunlight is reflected “pretty evenly” in both the red and blue wavelengths equally, that is why you do not see bluish clouds even when you are very close to the clouds while in a plane. I have a feeling that both red and blue wavelengths still fare evenly in this case in terms of back scattering, diffusion, whatever you’d call it.
Still that is not a perfect scientific explanation, i’d need to google that some more, maybe some folks with more scientific knowledge can chime in.
I’m no pro, but i still personally believe at this point that even with a CW 7000K and WW 3000K big difference in CCT, there is no technical/scientific difference in terms of back scattering “glare”.
However there might be a perceived difference - eg WW in homes, it gives you a warm feeling vs CW. And also, warm white in low lumens/low intensity look and feel better than cold white. It’s sorta “hard wired” to our brains. Vice versa is true, cold white looks/feels better in a high intensity high-lux hotspot than WW…… you try to illum your living room with 2kW of halogen vs 400W of high CRI LED. Though it probably does not matter much in your specific case.
I think i mentioned before that the Astrolux MF01/Mateminco MT18 might have too big a hotspot, it probably is bigger than the BLF Q8’s hotspot. So no guarantees the hotspot would not hit the water/ground at 15 metres mounted 1-2 feet high. It also does not have much spill due to the nature of the TIR’s optics, thus cutting out a fair bit on your kayak’s navigation at 2-5 metres? It does have 50k cd though, sufficient for your throw. Youtube it for hotspot/spill characteristics.
Fenix FD65 is nice. 3800 lumens, 42k cd. Close and long range zoomable. However it is not going to be doing both at the same time unlike the reflectors.
But it’d do both short-range spill and long range illum better than similarly specc-ed reflectors when zoomed out and zoomed in respectively. With the reflector lights, you can use 1 hand to ramp up/down the intensity. With this Fenix FD65, you’d need 2 hands to zoom, in addition to intensity ups/downs, on your kayak, maybe just 1 hand sometimes when it’s mounted. Can you live with this additional need for zooming in real life use? So it’s up to your choice.
I got a ’20GT and a coupla regular ’20s. Both are the wider-head lights, not tubelights, but still nice and compact. Both are even marginally shorter than my Wuben i332, even though that takes only a 16340!
The GT has some nice “reach”, while the regular ’20 has a wider hotspot. For EDCing, the ’20 seems more practical, as you’re more likely to be grubbling around things close-up vs spotting owls in trees. Camping (and by extension kayaking or anything outdoorsy) I might lean towards the GT for the throw.
Only thing is you’ll need button-tops or at least a solder-blob for the Nitecores, as there’s no driver-side spring, so be sure to get one if you don’t have one already.
A cheapie headlight like a Boruit RJ02, you can replace the come-with TIR lens for anything you want, even a 5° or 8° one.