Airboat Enthusiasts Feel a Chill

The moon is yellowish, a nearly full disk set high behind wispy clouds. In the tepid, inky waters of this lake in north-central Florida, the eyes of lurking alligators, hundreds of eyes, glint a fierce orange.

It’s a primeval tableau, a reminder of the time before humans arrived in this corner of the world. Except for Allen Perry and his airboat.

This night, the retired pipeline welder with the Fu Manchu mustache is on the water, hunting leopard frogs with a 10-foot gigging pole. To move around, he uses a shallow-draft barge fitted with an engine and an airplane-like propeller. At all but the very slowest speeds, the watercraft emits a combined low rumble and high-pitched whine.

“Airboats are my first love,” said the 68-year-old Louisiana native, who is known around here as “Cajun.” He added: “The day they say we can’t run airboats, there’s a ‘for sale’ sign on my place.”

An increasing number of Floridians, though, are fed up with airboats’ noise and are demanding limits on their use or volume.

“Airboaters come blasting through here at 4 in the morning,” said Richard “Whitey” Markle, 61, a woodshop teacher who lives 150 feet from the south shore of Orange Lake. “There’s no way you’re going to sleep. The house literally shakes.”

“We’re talking about them being loud two to three miles away,” said Alachua County Sheriff Stephen M. Oelrich, another lakefront resident. “All airboaters wear ear protection. The people in the community don’t.”

This unusual mode of water transportation, which is found as far away as Alaska and Arizona, has been for decades an emblem of the Everglades and other backcountry areas of Florida. There are 12,000 to 18,000 airboats in Florida, according to state airboat associations. Florida’s government agencies don’t keep count.

Recently, the boats have been employed in search and rescue in New Orleans and other hurricane-stricken areas of the Gulf Coast.

The vessels, which marry a car or airplane engine to an air propeller enclosed in a large metal cage and have a flat-bottomed hull with a square-cut bow, are a practical way to navigate shallow lakes, marshes and tidal flats where a water propeller might hit bottom or become tangled in vegetation. In many ways, airboaters say, their craft, which skims along the water’s surface, is nature-friendly.

“There’s no oil in the water, no motor in the water, and you’re not tearing up the environment,” Perry said. “Plus, whatever you hit bounces back.”

However, recent technology has made airboats more powerful, and therefore often louder. And because of Florida’s fast growth, once-secluded areas have more residents to hear airboats’ noise -- and to object.

“When I was raised in Florida, you could run an airboat for a week and nobody might see or hear you,” said H.A. “Herky” Huffman, 68, of Enterprise, Fla., an airboater and chairman of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Now there are more than 16 million people, and everybody wants to live on the water.”

In recent years, in response to property owners’ demands, Lakeland in central Florida has banned airboats; Leesburg, about 55 miles north, has forbidden their nighttime use on two lakes; and Manatee County on the Gulf of Mexico coast has banned them near certain populated coastlines.

In Marion County, south of Orange Lake, authorities have decreed that airboat noise cannot exceed 90 decibels at 50 feet, or about the volume of a subway train or shouted conversation.

Orange Lake, fringed by water oaks and cabbage palms, has become one of the state’s main battlegrounds for the controversy. When author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived on the eastern shore, where she grew oranges and wrote the 1938 coming-of-age classic “The Yearling,” there were seven families. Now, there are more than 600.

This rural, isolated part of Florida roughly halfway between Gainesville and Ocala, Rawlings wrote, “belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.” There may have been no airboats.

Nowadays, Oelrich noted, “it’s a different world.” About a year and a half ago, the four-term sheriff moved into a house near the Rawlings property, which today is a state park. Although a native Floridian and no stranger to airboats, Oelrich said he was astonished to hear how much noise they could make. The boats are sometimes so annoying, he said, that they drown out guides in Depression-era costumes who escort visitors through the eight-room Rawlings farmhouse.

“Take a 500-cubic-inch Chevy engine,” the sheriff said. “Regardless of whether it’s in a car or an airboat, it’s going to be really, really loud.”

Florida law requires all powered watercraft to be “effectively muffled,” but state officials say the rule isn’t enforced on airboats because it’s vague.

The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, at a Sept. 21 public meeting in St. Petersburg, is to consider a scientific study on airboat noise and possible ways to reduce it.

The commission staff has recommended that airboats, like cars, be required to have mufflers on the exhaust system, as well as other design modifications, including specialized propellers and changes in the engine. But according to the preliminary draft of the scientific study, even an airboat fitted with a muffler exceeds 90 decibels at open throttle. The reason is that as power increases, the propeller makes more noise than the motor.

“I think everybody understands there has to be some kind of muffling system,” Huffman said. But the fish and wildlife chairman expects a raucous meeting, with some airboaters protesting any tightening of regulations, and opponents insisting on even more stringent limits on noise and use.

Airboats, like motorcycles and snowmobiles, are used for recreation and sport as well as transportation. Because of the disturbance they can create, all have been the subject of legal and other battles -- especially in areas known for their serenity.

“There are people who won’t tolerate each other,” said Randall H. Reid, manager of Alachua County, which includes Orange Lake. Reid said one solution, which his county plans to consider, was zoning waterways for specific uses. One lake might be reserved for canoeists, another for airboaters.

“It will work itself out in a balance of the needs of the different groups,” Reid said. “It won’t be satisfactory to everyone.”

In the eyes of many airboaters, a time-honored Florida way of transportation and recreation is in peril, essentially from uncomprehending newcomers.

“If you come down here and buy waterfront property with the idea of it being quiet and serene, it’s never been that way,” said Jerry L. Wetherington, 57, a native of Gainesville who got his first airboat when he was in high school. “There’s always been boaters.”

That heritage argument, Oelrich claimed, is largely hogwash. “The vast majority of these [airboat operators] don’t live on the lake. They live somewhere in suburbia,” the sheriff said. “What they kind of want to do is bring the thunder and lightning to your door, then leave.”

About 125 people attended a meeting last month in Ocala to start a local airboaters association to defend the craft in this area of Florida. Wetherington, a computer programmer, was named president. Hoping to promote a more peaceful coexistence with owners of waterfront property, the club adopted a code of ethics.

“We’ve been having a problem with some people doing what they shouldn’t be doing with boats,” Wetherington said.

To do his part, Perry recently installed twin mufflers on his boat’s 250-horsepower modified aircraft engine. He admits to having been pleasantly surprised that the motor idles better. The double-bladed composite propeller that he now uses also makes less noise than some other types, he said.

The airboat and frog-gigging enthusiast, who has lived in Florida for 31 years, isn’t bothered by airboat noise. He wears hearing aids in both ears and removes them when on his airboat. Perry said he wants to be a good neighbor. But he shakes his head at the notion of zoning airboat use on Orange Lake or imposing a curfew to reduce airboat noise at night.

You can only hunt frogs after dark, he said. He needs the $8 a pound he can make to supplement his Social Security, he said.

On Orange Lake’s 12,250-acre expanse, the spatterdock, hydrilla and other aquatic plants are so dense in parts that a “kicker boat” -- an outboard -- would rapidly become entangled, Perry said. “This is an airboat lake,” he said with a gentle Louisiana accent. “It’s a heritage. Airboats have been here long before I ever was.”

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Controversial watercraft

Some Floridians who live around rural Orange Lake are calling for limits on airboats because of the noise they make. Existing laws regulating the shallow-draft vessels are vague. A look at airboats:

* Maximum speed: 60 mph

* Fiberglass or aluminum hull

* Can skim on water 1/2 inch deep and over dry land for short distances

* No propeller or rudder underneath to snag submerged objects

Engine powers a propeller that moves the boat forward. Rudder-like flaps steer the boat.

Sources: Orlando Sentinel, ESRI, TeleAtlas, USGS