I love fishing and as part of that I also enjoy bowfishing (fishing with a bow and arrow). Many people do this at night with lights and there are some nice set-ups out there for that.
However during daylight hours it becomes much more difficult. Glare makes seeing underwater a problem and the solution has been to use polarized sunglasses :sunglasses: . Oddly enough however, on cloudy days the glare is far worse, to the point that the polarized glasses are far less effective.
So, I’ve been thinking of ways to overcome this problem with a light or lights mounted to my boat under the water line to help reduce the glare.
I’m looking for ideas. I’d like to be able to overcome the glare on the cloudy days. Is a polarized light possible? Any other solutions?
The part about cloudy days being worse makes sense actually. In direct sunlight, polarized filter helps as most glare is from surface reflection and the sunglasses filter just that very effectively, enabling you to see everything else relatively bright. On cloudy days there is relatively less direct reflection compared to other glare, and less beight light to reach the water below surface.
In theory, that is. I’m just trying to guess based on elementary physics. I am not familiar with this sort of fishing but looking to try with a crossbow this year.
I can not add more low tech solutions(and won’t get started on more complicated stuff I could not manage anyway) to your list except maybe wavelength filtering, aka just colored lenses. They might improve visibility and probably are nothing new - like most my ideas. Whether it actually works well idk.
To see the fish well there needs to be enough light reflecting off the fish and reaching your eyes. But this light from the fish can be obscured by light reflecting from the surface of the water. This is the problem of glare. It’s sort of like when you are inside your house with the lights on looking out the window. During the day there is a lot of light outside and you can see outside without a problem. At night there is less light and now all you see is reflections off the window from the inside of your house.
On a cloudy day there is just less light illuminating the fish, and the glare from the surface obscures the already small amount of light you are getting from the fish. So to fix this problem there needs to be more light illuminating the fish but that doesn’t contribute to the glare. Lights under the water line should help with this.
I’ve done it with a crossbow but switched back to my compound, which I think is much safer in a boat and actually easier to aim for fishing. I do like my crossbow for deer hunting though.
That may work, but, I need a way to mount it (under the water line) to my boat. I wonder if something like this one Brinyte 3000LM XML-U2 3 LEDs Underwater 150M Scuba Diving light would be bright enough to be seen.