A little rewiring of the boat, specifically, the dash lights
it is nice to have them so you can read the gauges at night, but they are wired into the ignition so when the ignition is on, the lights are on
this is off course a waste of energy (and bulb life) during the day, and it can actually be quite annoying at night, when everything is pitch dark but the lights of the gauges are reflected in the windshield and you cant see in front of you
so, i decided to rewire them
i spend a few hours trying to chase down the feed for the lights and finally decided it would be quicker to simply build a new wiring harness and start from scratch
i bought a few of these little doohickeys to split of the feed from the anchor light switch
this way, the gauges can only come on when the navigation or anchor lights are on (i did this as a fail safe to make sure the lights dont stay on when i park the boat)
i got a few more things to add later, and when that is done i will add a switch further on in the wiring so i can still manually kill the lights for night time navigation