safety light

I do nearly all my fishing kayaking in Sarasota Bay during day light hours. There are power boats that come through at hight speed. Although I have the papaya orange compass and have a safety flag mounted on a pole I thought it might also be useful to have a flashing red light mounted on a pole to increase my visibility to boaters. I know YakAttack makes a pole mounted light but it seems to be a white light. Plus, I am not sure how visible this light would be during the day. I have considered mounting lights made for bicyclist's, but these are probably not water proof. Any suggestions?

The Coast Guard regulations relating to lights specify a white light for kayaks. That's why all the commercially manufactured kayak lights and flags have white lights. If you mount other color lights on a kayak, you'll create confusion about what you are. It would be like replacing the red tail lights on your car with green or blue lights. If the confusion results in a crash between a motorboat and your kayak, your kayak (and you) will suffer more damage than the motorboat. If a lawsuit arises from such a crash, the owner of the motorboat will have a strong argument that you were negligent to mount any color light other than a white light on your kayak.

Most commercially available safety flags are small and not much higher than a kayaker's head. An option to increase your visibility in the daytime is to make a large safety flag out of ripstop nylon and clip it to the top of a spare fishing pole. I made a safety flag and light pole with a big flag out of an inexpensive Walmart fishing pole, which I described in a post at https://www.northwestkayakanglers.com/i ... #msg164358, but it would be much easier to just mount a large safety flat on a spare fishing pole.