Do LED lights not throw over water?

So I live in a house that is right on the ocean. Last night I came home and heard some movement on the water. Just ducks or some other kind of birds. The water line is literally only about 25 feet away from the point I was standing. I felt like the birds I was hearing were about to fly into my face. It was 2AM. When I shined my light down the road (a Quark Turbo 123x2) it lights up everything 200-300 feet away no problem. It outshines the visibleness of the road. However when I turn and try to shine the light on the water, nothing is visible. I couldn't even make the water out. The waves, movement, nothing. The moon was lighting up a good portion of the ocean and that was easy to make out. It's a very odd phenomenon I've had happen to me a few times before in this area. This experience was so odd I felt like I had to ask others if they had experienced it.



Could it be something about the reflectiveness of water? The type of LED I am using? Would an incan be better on water? Any ideas guys?

All lights do worse with wet ground/water.

Take a drive on any wet road at night. Any car, any headlight type.

You see the degraded performance instantly.

You ought to see what open water and frozen overflow look like at night - the same - black! Talk about disconcerting!
There's little to reflect back and all the light does is reflect away from you so unless you have a good idea what's there from having been there during daylight hours, you have to stop and walk towards it so you can shine your light downward, or do the stomp-test method, which is no fun when you just need to get by.

You see things because light reflects back to you. Most objects scatter light in many directions, making them visible under various lighting conditions. When aiming light at a smooth surface, like water, the water does not reflect light back to you because it is reflecting it in the opposite direction.

Incan, LED, HID, it doesn't matter. Nothing lights up well over water. 3,000,000 cp 12 volt halogen lights will barely pick out bouys in the ICW or St Johns River. As was said, the water reflects the light away from you and you see nothing.

I'm sure the answer lies in the overall reflectivity of the surfaces on which you're shining the light. I'm no lighting or RADAR engineer, but as an analogy think of a fighter aircraft "lighting up" a bogie aircraft 50mi away. The larger the RADAR cross-section, the "brighter" the object appears on the screen. In terms of lighting, I imagine that any land-based scene has a far, far higher "reflectivity cross-section" than any scene over water. On the ocean, a buoy is about the only thing reliably reflecting back the light, whereas on land there is every grass shoot, tree, rock and spec reflecting portions of the light back toward you. I'm sure Feinman or someone has mathematically described the phenomenon.

Water is a tricky subset of the dark, which is, in general, trickier than the light. Spending years and years on ships at sea I can confirm that the water presents many visibility problems.

When dealing with water (and other difficult examples) it may be useful to not only question the performance of our lights -- but OUR OWN performance as well. While some may scoff at this notion I would advise using relaxation techniques when trying to view things under difficult circumstances. Aside from the negative visual effects of the water it should be remembered that any stress connected with the situation will also have a tendency to cloud your perception of it. Breath control and other calming techniques can definitely help you to see more in any visually challenging environ whether it's at sea or, for example, in technical theatre. From my own experience I know that people who have a greater ability to concentrate can be taught to see more in the same situation. The idea is that enhanced concentration may enable you to see more of what may be seen. This is very real.

Also, recognize the difficulties inherent in water environs (already noted in other posts in this thread) and use them to your advantage. Often dark adapted vision (mostly Mesopic) may be preserved with a much, much brighter light around water than around land. As long as your pointing discipline is good the water won't blow it back on you as objects do on land.

To see better and have more confidence you may give yourself a boost by buying or building a light for use around water. I like 'really bright and really tight' around water.

Another couple of points should be noted about using lights to search for things on the water.

First of all, searching for things on the surface of the water is similar to searching the sky for enemy planes in a couple of ways. Both the sky and the surface of the water are somewhat homogeneous in that in both cases there is usually nothing there and the important thing is that in both cases there is no reference to focus on as our eyes move from spot to spot. In WWII lookouts were instructed to not continuously sweep the sky looking for planes but instead were advised to follow a definite pattern whereby their eyes would stop for a brief moment to give their eyes a chance to focus before moving on to the adjacent area.

I believe that that's good advice for searching the surface of water, also. If you happen to be using an artificial light source and binoculars to search in marine environs the focus problem becomes even more complex -- depending on the design of the binoculars and their depth of field.

On the positive side, another advantage to searching for things on the water is that objects in the water usually have a much higher Signal to Noise Ratio than objects on land do and this may be used to your advantage, once you wrap your head around it.

When you shine your light, looking for something on land, you light up all kinds of crap. On the one hand it is handy -- or more likely familiar -- because we are used to having to sort out this noise all the time in the daytime. We are accustomed to this on land and daytime noise because it gives us a frame of reference -- things that are concrete to focus on and solid things that unconsciously are always reminding us, "I've already looked over there -- I remember that thing."

Contrast that with the feedback we get when we search the surface of water at night. Usually there will be no clues to tell us where we are looking or whether or not we've already looked there. Usually we get nothing to focus on -- and that is very important. That is why stopping and moving your eyes in a pattern is so important when searching in marine environs.

Getting back to Signal to Noise, the good news is that if you have the right light and the right pointing discipline and have used the right scanning technique, if there is anything out there and you hit it with the light and you are paying attention -- it should light right up and jump right out at you since there usually will be no noise around it to tug at your eye. Unfortunately this is all pretty counterintuitive. Getting back to the Original Post, if the practices listed above were followed it just means that there was probably nothing but water there that night -- the LED may have worked fine. That may be hard to bend your head around. Nothing is never what we see on land.

OTOH if the blowback from the objects on the land in the foreground overwhelmed your vision, then all bets are off.

Sub Umbra, well said & instruction received.

I can concur on your aviation related info based on many years there and related instruction received.

The marine issues concur with my very limited civilian experience there, but I'm looking forward to more of that soon (coastal sailing).