Gary, I feel your pain. Bay and Ocean racer and sailing instructor.
First an answer that will have appeal in this crowd.
Assuming that the above link is a bit over the top.
Lets re think this?
The radar hopefully will help tons with “seeing” the big ships (and that is huge, pun intended).
For a powerboat as boat speeds are higher and you have a ready power source, so it might make sense to install supplementary lighting, but the ocean is a big place so you may want to carefully pick your battles in your specified objectives.
For sailboats offshore. There is a reason why red lights are on sailboats, and that is the well known fact that RED does not blow out the Rods like white light does.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html
“Rod Details
The rods are the most numerous of the photoreceptors, some 120 million, and are the more sensitive than the cones. However, they are not sensitive to color. They are responsible for our dark-adapted, or scotopic, vision. The rods are incredibly efficient photoreceptors. More than one thousand times as sensitive as the cones, they can reportedly be triggered by individual photons under optimal conditions. *The optimum dark-adapted vision is obtained only after a considerable period of darkness, say 30 minutes or longer, because the rod adaption process is much slower than that of the cones.
*The rod sensitivity is shifted toward shorter wavelengths compared to daylight vision, accounting for the growing apparent brightness of green leaves in twilight.
While the visual acuity or visual resolution is much better with the cones, the rods are better motion sensors. Since the rods predominate in the peripheral vision, that peripheral vision is more light sensitive, enabling you to see dimmer objects in your peripheral vision. If you see a dim star in your peripheral vision, it may disappear when you look at it directly since you are then moving the image onto the cone-rich fovea region which is less light sensitive. You can detect motion better with your peripheral vision, since it is primarily rod vision.
The rods employ a sensitive photopigment called rhodopsin.
Rods Do Not See Red!
The light response of the rods peaks sharply in the blue; they respond very little to red light. This leads to some interesting phenomena:
Red rose at twilight: In bright light, the color-sensitive cones are predominant and we see a brilliant red rose with somewhat more subdued green leaves. But at twilight, the less-sensitive cones begin to shut down for the night, and most of the vision comes from the rods. The rods pick up the green from the leaves much more strongly than the red from the petals, so the green leaves become brighter than the red petals!
The ship captain has red instrument lights. Since the rods do not respond to red, the captain can gain full dark-adapted vision with the rods with which to watch for icebergs and other obstacles outside. It would be undesirable to examine anything with white light even for a moment, because the attainment of optimum night-vision may take up to a half-hour. Red lights do not spoil it.
These phenomena arise from the nature of the rod-dominated dark-adapted vision, called scotopic vision.”
Considering that navigation buoys have night flashing lights on them this helps a lot and if you want to look for the daymarks at night a hand held thrower (In red would be best) could be very useful.
But trying to mount enough white lights to the front/bow to give you visibility to see everything you list in a rocking and rolling boat (as opposed to a nice stable car that is really only looking for the lane markings) is a scope of work that maybe is not cost effective.
However having a good red (search the rigging light) and flood lights mounted under the main spreaders (I think an mtg2 or two) on each side would be greatly appreciated when working on deck at night (obviously not for navigation).
As the boat has a “light planing hull” I will assume that the standard electrical budget when offshore comes into play. Something to calculate is just how much juice is used for hours and hours of night sailing (with the proposed spot/flood lights) (hay land lubbers don’t understand that one does not just pull over at night when offshore.) might wreak havoc with the Mah budget.
Better to eliminate all white lights topside and you will be surprised how much you can see! Consider that once you get in the groove you can feel the wave patterns well enough press on with minimal unnecessary banging on waves.
I am a big fan of the cree “photo red” emitters, lots of fun can still be had building custom lights.
My $.02