Nighttime play

[RAHfrolfer]

There is a local course that is a "glow" course. Lights on the baskets. My question is, does everyone use glow in the dark discs? I am envisioning wearing a headlamp and you'd need to "charge up" the glow with it before throwing a drive? How many discs should I prepare to lose?

 

[txmxer]

I use glow tape and carry a UV flashlight. Put a piece of tape on the top and bottom of the disc. Charge up the tape before teeing off. Glow usually lasts long enough to finish the hole.

Don't overplay it.

 

[seedlings]

UV flashlight and glow discs or glow tape as mentioned. There are also now glow decals/stickers my buddies used last night. Regular flashlights 'work' but also blind your vision. If you can find a UV flashlight in the invisible (to humans) spectrum, that's the best.

 

[BryanC]

I play quite a bit of night golf. Glow discs or adding a piece of glow tape on any disc works pretty well with a good UV flashlight for a quick charge before throwing. But my preference for drivers is to use an LED light taped to the bottom of the disc. MVP has some good ones and you can find unbranded stuff on ebay that work pretty well too. I use Gorilla brand tape for attaching them to the discs. It works great. I can't tell the difference in the disc's flight with or without a LED on the bottom. They shine through champion, DX and most star type plastics (and non-Innova equivalents).

For glow tape, my preference is XFasten glow tape, which can be found on Amazon. I've tried 4 or 5 different types of glow tape, and this is the best I've used.

If you do want to buy glow discs, MVP seem to be the brightest, followed closely by Kastaplast. Innova and Gateway are way behind those brands in terms of glow brightness and duration. Even Lightning (OOP) glow discs glow better than Innova. I have some DGA glow stuff but I don't really use it. I have not tried glow discs from the other brands and can't comment on them. All that said, I use glow Rocs anyway because I love Rocs and they glow long enough for me to find them after throwing. And I putt with glow Wizards year round, day & night.

I almost never lose discs at night. It is much more common, in my experience, to lose them in the daytime.

 

[BogeyNoMore]

I strongly urge people not to wear headlamps during glow rounds, or even normal flashlights. They cause other players' eyes to dilate, and impare night vision.

As others mentioned, LED UV lights are the way to go. Your eyes quickly get used to the darkness. Using white light prevents them from adjusting as well.

One nice thing about glow discs: it's often easier to find a glow disc that lands in the shule, brush, or tall grass, than it would be to find a disc that lands in the exact same spot during the day, because you can see little patches of glowing light through the brush.

Glow tape and LED lights can do the same thing, provided they aren't covered by a large leaf, stick, etc. when the disc comes to rest.

 

[ru4por]

Doubling down on Bogey's post. NO HEADLAMPS. Honestly, in my many years of outdoor adventuring, headlamps have a pretty limited scope of utility. In any group setting, you WILL end up blinding everyone by looking at them, with your light on. Infinitely worse when you are protecting your night vision. Hiking, fishing or fixing something are some of the only solid applications I have found for a headlamp.

Night golf really is an effort to introduce as little light as possible. I use mostly glow disc, with a black LED light. I have a few with glow decals as well.

 

[The Shide]

I use to play in a glow league. Learned many different ways to illuminate a disc.
The most frustrating thing to happen is playing with newbs who insist upon using a light (their cell phone or a flashlight) & mess up everybody's night vision.
"Where's my disc? Oh, let me flash my light over here where all of you are standing & blind you."
GRRRRRR!!
Here's a tip for "igniting" you glow disc if you do not own a UV light.
Hold your disc against your chest/belly. Put the flashlight on the disc. Then turn the light on. Run the light around the disc several times, without EVER lifting the light off the disc. Then turn the light off. Now you can remove you flashlight. Hurry to the teepad & throw before the glow fades. Hope your disc doesn't land under a pile of leaves. Repeat.

 

[txmxer]

Glow tape has very little effect on the flight of a disc as far as I can tell. I suppose if the disc is translucent, you can apply the tape or led to the underside and it will have even less impact on the flight. But, most of the discs I use for glow are solid, so it's important to put tape on the top and bottom and to give it a flash from the UV light on both sides.

I've tried a few UV lights, and I found that a larger light is better. This is similar to the one I'm using--though the specific brand I have is no longer available. I think most of these lights are made by one or two Chinese companies, then sold under a specific brand name, but you will find multiple companies selling what is or at least appears to be the same item.

https://smile.amazon.com/Powerful-U...icXNhIjoiMy4wMiIsInFzcCI6IjIuOTkifQ==&sr=8-28

Anyway, it works great. 5 seconds or so and the glow tape is charged up and ready to go.

As someone said above, glow discs are generally easier to find than a regular disc in daylight. And that is an upside to the LED's. If you don't find the disc quickly, the LED will keep blinking/glowing, where as the tape will start to fade. Also, it was suggested using high quality tape for the LED. The sticky backs provided with the LED's don't seem to hold on very well, so you will definitely want to use something additional for attaching the light.

 

[ray1970]

Glow tape has very little effect on the flight of a disc as far as I can tell.

Well, obviously you just aren't using enough tape. Wrap the outer rim with a bunch of it so you can get that "gyro" effect. Or for giggles just put a bunch of it in one spot near the outside of the rim.

Seriously, a piece near the center even top and bottom isn't noticeable to me. That's why I am always impressed with people who tell me they get drastically different results from a 171g disc than they do from a 168g disc. Kudos to them for noticing the subtle nuances of the flight from such a small weight difference.

 

[R-Ogre]

A red single LED headlamp is fine for wayfinding in the woods and won't ruin everyone's night vision.

Our local club runs some glow leagues but the format is unbearable. No rules against bright lights, only against having one going while you throw, so everyone is out there with their 1.21 gigawatt white LED headlamps spotting the basket and blinding each other. On top of that they think it's a badge of honor to not use anything on the baskets, so now you're trying to putt in the dark woods at an unilluminated basket right after some dingus seared your retinas. The only time it's sort of ok is when there's a lot of snow on the ground, the albedo is enough that people cool it with the headlamps and you can at least see the outline of the basket.

Also be careful with the UV lights you buy, the cheap ones I always see at the course have a ton of visual spectrum and so they don't work great for charging discs without also blinding people.

 

[gwsmallwood]

I just played my first glow round this weekend with 3 Eclipse 2.0 discs. A cheap UV light worked fine. I bought one for like $8 at Harbor Freight. It worked great if I just used it while we walked between holes or waited to tee off. It glowed really bright for the duration of the hole but probably would have been plenty bright enough for 6-9 holes if needed.

I'll probably upgrade to a larger UV light like this one from Amazon next time, as a couple of guys had these and they seemed to work better.
https://amzn.to/3FaIwMs

I also had one of these laying around that I left inside my small Innova Standard bag, which seemed to help a little.
https://amzn.to/3VR1Q7H

I also had some leaded UV LEDs laying around, so I used a watch battery to power them and taped them to the underside of the discs. I don't think those really did all that much compared to the flashlight. If I could find some that project the light in the proper direction, I'm sure they would work better, but pretty much all of these 5mm leaded LEDs project away from the leads.
https://amzn.to/3TxNRC2

If you'd rather just use LEDs on your normal discs, you can use an actual leaded LED with a CR2032 or CR2025 3V coin cell battery. Just use tape to affix the leads on the LEDs to opposite sides of the battery, then use clear tape to connect the LEDs to the disc. I would stick with blue or white LEDs and use 2 per disc. Trust me, 2 LEDs on opposite sides of the battery looks way cooler in flight. Bonus tip, tape some of them off-center. It looks super cool. The batteries should last a couple of rounds. This is cheaper and more durable per setup than the ready-made sticky LEDs you can get from MVP or the like, and basically the same amount of work, because you'll need to tape those down too.

LEDs - https://amzn.to/3TyKHhd
Batteries - https://amzn.to/3gFlenJ

As someone already mentioned, packing tape can work, but it's not very durable. There's a flexible form of packing tape that works much better. Normal packing tape will also peel the stamps off the top of your discs. I've heard of people using Gorilla Crystal Clear Tape, Clear Duct Tape, or even Hockey Sock tape.

 

[txmxer]

I just played my first glow round this weekend with 3 Eclipse 2.0 discs. A cheap UV light worked fine. I bought one for like $8 at Harbor Freight. It worked great if I just used it while we walked between holes or waited to tee off. It glowed really bright for the duration of the hole but probably would have been plenty bright enough for 6-9 holes if needed.

I'll probably upgrade to a larger UV light like this one from Amazon next time, as a couple of guys had these and they seemed to work better.
https://amzn.to/3FaIwMs

I also had one of these laying around that I left inside my small Innova Standard bag, which seemed to help a little.
https://amzn.to/3VR1Q7H

I also had some leaded UV LEDs laying around, so I used a watch battery to power them and taped them to the underside of the discs. I don't think those really did all that much compared to the flashlight. If I could find some that project the light in the proper direction, I'm sure they would work better, but pretty much all of these 5mm leaded LEDs project away from the leads.
https://amzn.to/3TxNRC2

If you'd rather just use LEDs on your normal discs, you can use an actual leaded LED with a CR2032 or CR2025 3V coin cell battery. Just use tape to affix the leads on the LEDs to opposite sides of the battery, then use clear tape to connect the LEDs to the disc. I would stick with blue or white LEDs and use 2 per disc. Trust me, 2 LEDs on opposite sides of the battery looks way cooler in flight. Bonus tip, tape some of them off-center. It looks super cool. The batteries should last a couple of rounds. This is cheaper and more durable per setup than the ready-made sticky LEDs you can get from MVP or the like, and basically the same amount of work, because you'll need to tape those down too.

LEDs - https://amzn.to/3TyKHhd
Batteries - https://amzn.to/3gFlenJ

As someone already mentioned, packing tape can work, but it's not very durable. There's a flexible form of packing tape that works much better. Normal packing tape will also peel the stamps off the top of your discs. I've heard of people using Gorilla Crystal Clear Tape, Clear Duct Tape, or even Hockey Sock tape.

I have one of the smaller LED flashlights you linked. It works okay, but it's been somewhat problematic about not coming on even with fresh batteries. Open it up, shake it around, etc. Probably just a one off issue, but I really like the larger UV flashlight I use now.

 

[sillybizz]

This maybe a little crazy to some but I play after dark with no lights or glow discs or anything. I play courses I know well and are on the shorter side, wait for my night vision to kick in and just play in the dark. Certain colors are better but I've never lost a disc.

 

[ray1970]

This maybe a little crazy to some but I play after dark with no lights or glow discs or anything. I play courses I know well and are on the shorter side, wait for my night vision to kick in and just play in the dark. Certain colors are better but I've never lost a disc.

Same. Well, except I don't really have night vision at my age.

We play a short, familiar nine hole course and I have a uv flashlight that we use to help spot the discs. Its crazy how much some colors pop when the black light hits them even though they aren't glow discs.