Best LED Bowfishing Lights
Bowfishing is one of the more unique and fun sports out there, as well as both a really effective and enjoyable way of fishing. After all, why stand there with a fishing rod for hours, hoping for something to finally bite when you can literally take matters into your own hands and arrow the fish down?
Of course, as any similar activity, there are a number of bowfishing accessories that are more or less needed for a successful experience in addition to the bowfishing bow and arrows. And the one we’d like to cover today is the various bowfishing LED lights you can use when you’re fishing in the middle of the night.
| Image | Name | Our Rating | Purchase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1of 8 |  | Nilight Bowfishing Light Bar | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
2of 8 |  | AMBOTHER LED Pods Light Bars | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
3of 8 |  | Cutequeen LED Bowfishing Spotlights | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
4of 8 |  | NAO LED Bowfishing Flood Lights | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
5of 8 |  | Nilight LED Bowfishing Lights | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
6of 8 |  | Northpole Waterproof Flood Light | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
7of 8 |  | DJI 4X4 LED Light Bar | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
8of 8 |  | SUCOOL LED Flood Beam Lights | READ OUR REVIEW | CHECK PRICEon amazon.com |
Unlike standard fishing, with bowfishing you need pretty much perfect visibility at all times if you are to ever catch anything. But because a lot of fishing is best done at night, and since you need excellent visibility not only over the surface of the water but beneath it as well, a powerful set of LED bowfishing lights is pretty much a prerequisite to a successful hunt.
And, so, to help you find the right set of LED bowfishing lights for your needs, we’ve compiled two lists – a Top 3 and a Top 5 of the best bowfishing lights on the market, accompanied by a quick and handy guide on how to pick the ones for you and how to use them.
Top 3 best LED bowfishing lights
1. Nilight Bowfishing Light Bar
Nilight LED Bowfishing Light Bar
This budget-friendly and long-lasting LED light bar offers excellent spot and flood lighting.
*click for the current price and availability
Specifications
- Manufacturer: Nilight
- Wattage: 72 watts
- Bulb Brightness: 4790 lumens
- Fixture Colour: Black
- Dimensions: 18 by 5.5 by 5.4 inches
- Weight: 2.02 pounds
- Other Features: mounting brackets included, IP67 rating
This 12 volt 72W light bar of Nilight can impress in a lot of different ways. One thing that easily adds it to most “Best LED bowfishing lights” lists, for example, is the amazing durability and longevity that it offers.
It also comes in a lot of different variants – you can buy a 20-inch triple row lights, as well as a 32, 34, 42, and a 52-inch triple row alternatives. Each of them is made with the same high-quality, amazing heat sink properties, and effective spot and flood beams.
Advantages
- This bowfishing light bar has the impressive lifespan of over 50,000 hours under normal use.
- The spot beam of this bowfishing spotlight offers great distance while the flood beam can illuminate a broad view area very well. There is also a combo beam option.
- The heat dissipation on this unit is guaranteed by the die-cast aluminum alloy heat sinks. This allows for a great cooling effect and almost no heat emissions.
- These Nilight LED bowfishing lights also offer very high performance – an IP67 rating, a protective housing, as well as a dustproof, waterproof, and quakeproof design.
- Another factor that puts these among the best bow-mounted light for bowfishing is their great budget-friendly price.
Disadvantages
- The assembly of these 12v bowfishing lights can be a little tricky. The metal sheet doesn’t always match with the bolt holes too well so you might need to manually feed the adjustment bolts before you attach the mounting bracket.
- Some customers complain that the lights emit electrostatic discharge, meaning that they might interfere with your radio.
2. AMBOTHER Pods Light Bars
AMBOTHER LED Pods Light Bar
This AMBOTHER bowfishing lights bar offers amazing brightness and very good durability.
*click for the current price and availability
Specifications
- Manufacturer: AMBOTHER
- Wattage: 60 watts
- Bulb Brightness: 12800 lumens
- Fixture Colour: Black
- Dimensions: 3.8 by 3.2 by 2.5 inches
- Weight: 1.61 pounds
- Other Features: IP67 rating
A fantastic choice if you’re looking for cheap but durable and effective bowfishing lights, these AMBOTHER LED pod lights are among the best bowfishing lights for muddy water thanks to the incredible brightness they offer.
What’s more, they also come with the IP67 international standard and are perfectly waterproof, shock-proof, and corrosion-resistant. This makes them both great for off-road vehicles if you plan on bowfishing at remote locations, as well as simply durable and long-lasting.
Advantages
- What makes these AMBOTHER LED pods a worthy candidate for the “best bowfishing lights” prize is the incredible brightness that they offer. They provide a 6,000k super bright white light at 12,800lm.
- The dual row 15° spot light design that supports the 170° flood light in the middle offer excellent spotlighting.
- The die-casting aluminum shell is shock-proof, waterproof, and has great anti-corrosion properties. This makes these bowfishing lights incredibly durable and sturdy.
- Another thing that makes these AMBOTHER LED pods great bowfishing lights for sale is the thin radiator fins that work as an excellent cooling system, allowing the pod lights to cool down very quickly.
Disadvantages
- Unfortunately, the adjustment bracket does not allow for aiming the individual lights. They can only go as far up as the bracket allows which some customers find to be insufficient.
- The light spread is mostly horizontal and doesn’t reach that far into the distance.
3. Cutequeen LED Bowfishing Spotlights
Cutequeen LED Bowfishing Spotlight
The Cutequeen LED spotlights offer what’s likely the best quality/price ratio on the market.
*click for the current price and availability
Specifications
- Manufacturer: Cutequeen
- Wattage: 36 watts
- Bulb Brightness: 1800 lumens
- Fixture Colour: Black
- Dimensions: 15.6 by 7.9 by 2.7 inches
- Weight: 1.76 pounds
- Other Features: IP67 rating
If you’re looking for something powerful such as 100 watt led bowfishing lights, these Cutequeen might offer you something even better, especially for their price. These 4 spotlights are 36 watts lights each, with 3,600 lumens per light.
This makes them fantastic for any type of spot lighting while bowfishing, as well as for general vehicle lights on SUVs, Jeeps, tractors, or other off-road vehicles.
The brackets of these LED lights are made out of stainless steel for excellent durability, even if they are a bit flimsy and hard to install. Overall, they are very effective and efficient bowfishing lights.
Advantages
- The mounting bracket on these bowfishing spotlight LEDs is made out of stainless steel, allowing it to offer excellent stability and durability.
- Considering the great brightness these Cutequeen LED spotlights offer, they come at an incredibly cheap price.
- With a working temperature between 40 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, these spotlights are great at keeping cool even after continuous and intensive work.
- These Cutequeen LED spotlights come with an IP67 rating, a FCC, a CE, and a RoHs certificates. They also come with a 2-year warranty and a 30-day no-questions return guarantee.
Disadvantages
- The brackets on these LED spotlights can be a little flimsy so be extra careful when threading the screws. The mounting block isn’t incredibly sturdy either.
- The spotlights seem to come without any installation instructions which makes somewhat of a bad idea for first-time users of bowfishing lighting.
OTHER PRODUCTS TO CONSIDER
As listing just 3 items can’t possibly satisfy all needs and requirements, regardless of how good said items are, here are 5 more suggestions for some really good LED bowfishing lights. If our initial list didn’t offer what you are looking for, hopefully, this one will.
4. NAO LED Bowfishing Flood Lights
The NAO Bowfishing Lights are quite a nice and budget-friendly alternative. These LED bowfishing flood lights offer great performance and very good durability under most conditions. They are not 100% waterproof, however, so keep that in mind.
5. Nilight LED Bowfishing Lights
Another choice from Nilight, these LED bowfishing lights offer the brightness and design you’d expect from the brand. One weak area, however, is the mounting which is both difficult to install and with flimsy brackets.
6. Northpole Waterproof Flood Light
For an extra-long 52” bowfishing flood light bar, check out this Northpole Flood Light. It has a total of 100x 3-watt powerful LEDs as well as eco-friendly low power consumption and a long lifespan of over 30,000 hours. The lighting is not as powerful as you’d expect from 100 LED lights but it’s more than sufficient in most bowfishing situations.
7. DJI 4X4 LED Light Bar
A great LED light bar for bowfishing as well as for off-road driving, this DJI 4×4 Light Bar is a triple row, 7.5-inch long, and is powered at 102 watts of power. It’s very easy to mount and also quite durable, but it’s not the brightest item on the market by any means.
8. SUCOOL LED Flood Beam Lights
The SUCOOL LED Flood Beam Lights are another excellent choice for your bowfishing needs. Very bright and quite durable, they are excellent for most bowfishing needs. Keep in mind, however, that the spotlight beam of these lights is quite narrow making them more of a spotlight and not a flood light option.
General information about bowfishing lights
So, what’s so special about bowfishing LED lights?
Can’t a normal portable lamp do the same work by just pointing it at the water surface?
Well, not quite. Sure, any lamp can light up a part of the water’s surface, but bowfishing isn’t done by shooting arrows at the surface of the water but at targets that swim beneath it. And since water tends to distort the visibility of what’s beneath it, using a normal and weak light source can be grossly insufficient for your needs.
Instead, a good bowfishing LED lights set should meet several different characteristics to offer you the experience you’re looking for:
1. Water penetration. This is the most vital property of any good bowfishing light as excellent water penetration is required if you are to ever successfully hit anything with a bow at night. Of course, no LED light can penetrate deep water but that’s all right as neither can arrows – it’s enough for the light to penetrate the first meter (3-4 feet) beneath the surface of the water for you to be able to target what swims there. As long as the penetration is good and it offers good visibility in those first several feet, the light will be good for bowfishing.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are different types of light for different types of water:
- Warm white color light is best for penetrating through muddy water.
- Cool white color light, on the other hand, is better for shining through clear water.
2. The mounting of the lights. In addition to shining through the water’s surface, your bowfishing lights must also be practical and easy to work with. You need to be able to move them around with ease to check different sections of the water, and you also need to be able to target them with precision. For that reason, a lot of the people experienced with bowfishing prefer lights that can easily be mounted on a boat or a land vehicle, as this way they are able to drive around the coast or on the surface and shine ahead of them. Alternatively, you can use bow-mounted bowfishing lights but those have a much shorter range and lighting area so we haven’t mentioned them in our lists above.
3. Spot and flood adjustable lighting. A good bowfishing light will offer both an excellent spot and flood lighting, as well as a combination of the two, as that would make it useful in all situations.
4. Adjustable brightness. Some fish like the carp or, especially, the big head carp are quite light-sensitive. For these types of fish you’d need a light that offers sufficient light penetration but that also doesn’t blind and scare your prey away. You can also throw a filter on your bowfishing lights yourself but it’s usually better if they just have an adjustable brightness functionality.
5. Cooling system. A good set of bowfishing lights should have a good system for cooling off. If you get lights that heat up too much that will not only shorten their lifespan but will make bowfishing with them a hot nightmare for you.
6. Usable in other situations. Bowfishing lights aren’t really that expensive but it’s still preferable if they are also useful in other situations in addition to bowfishing. We really like vehicle-mounted lights for that reason, as they can be very good while driving as well.
Buying guide
Buying the right LED bowfishing lights for you is all about meeting two factors – getting lights of good enough quality and getting the right lights for your situation.
The first factor is simple enough, at least on principle – just make sure that whatever you get is made out of good materials, with a good design, and has enough brightness, heat cooling, and adjustable functions. If you’re at a loss at first – after all, all manufacturers claim that their products are the best – we recommend the following brands: Nilight, NAO, DJI, Cutequeen, SUCOOL, AMBOTHER, and Northpole.
As for your preferences, this is where things can get a little more complicated. Here’s what you need to consider before making your purchase:
- Do you need the lights for clear or for muddy water?
- Do you want to mount them on a land vehicle or a boat?
- Do you want spot lighting, flood lighting, or both?
- Do you need adjustable brightness?
- What power consumption are you ok with?
- Do you have a budgetary limit?
Other information about bowfishing lights
Bowfishing can be many things – a fun family activity, a sport, as well as simply a way of putting some food on the table. As a sport, bowfishing has been supported by the Bowfishing Association of America ever since its inception in 1990. The BAA has been following its original purpose of organizing bowfishing tournaments all throughout the U.S. for the past three decades, and they also work to support the various local bowfishing groups and clubs.
Today, the BAA members in the U.S. number in the thousands which isn’t much when compared to other sports but is more than enough to offer support and help to new bowfishing enthusiasts.
The reason why we’re mentioning this is that if you are one such bowfishing fan and you’re looking into joining in on the activity, contacting a local bowfishing group can get a lot more help, tips, and tricks, and additional information that’s suitable for your particular needs, than any online article ever could.
Usage tips for bowfishing lights
There are a lot of little things that go into bowfishing lighting, most of which we tend to discover as we use the lights and as we keep bowfishing. We can’t possibly exhaust all of them here as we’re sure we haven’t encountered all of them ourselves, but here are several more bowfishing light usage tips you might find useful:
- Make sure you get the right lights for the voltage of your vehicle. Getting lights that are too weak will be a waste in the best case and completely impractical in the worst case while getting lights that are too powerful for your vehicle or set-up simply won’t work.
- Consider the electrostatic discharge. This isn’t that meaningful during the act of bowfishing itself but if you plan on using the lights on your vehicle as well, having them emitting electrostatic discharge (ESD) can mess up with your radio.
- Adjustability is vital on the road as well. Even if you don’t intend on fishing carp or other light-sensitive fish if you plan on using the lights on the road as well, keep in mind that too bright LED lights – which is often great for bowfishing – can be a deadly danger on the road. All it takes is one driver in the opposite lane to get blinded at night and both of you can be in a great danger.
Conclusion
There are lots of different lights you can use for bowfishing. You can take any simple and portable light source with you and point it over the surface of the water if you want.
However, as bowfishing is a very precision dependent activity, the powerful spot and flood lighting offered by most vehicle lights usually end up being the best choice you can make. The fact that they are easily portable as they are literally meant to be mounted on top of a vehicle is just an added bonus for your bowfishing purposes.
So, now that we’ve gone over some of the best LED bowfishing lights you can fight on the market, maybe you’ve found ones that are suitable for your particular needs. If not, hopefully, you at least have a better idea of what to look for. And before we wrap things up, here are our Top 3 suggestions once again.
One of the best bowfishing lights on the market is this Nilight 12-inch LED light bar. It’s excellent for all types of vehicles, from cars and trucks to boats. It’s also great for bowfishing thanks to its very good spot and flood lighting, as well as admirable longevity and durability.
A great lighting option for your bowfishing needs, the AMBOTHER LED pods light bars offer amazing brightness of 12,800lm, especially considering the dirt-cheap price at which you can get this item. The combination of a 170” center flood light and two dual row 15” makes for great horizontal lighting that’s great for bowfishing.
The third on our list were the Cutequeen LED bowfishing spotlights. With 4 very powerful lights working in tandem, this set offers 4x 36 watts of power and 4x 3,600 lumens. Made out of great materials and with an excellent cooling system, these lights are very durable to both various weather conditions as well as time which is why they come with a 2-year warranty, accompanied by excellent customer support.
