Airboat Enthusiasts Feel a Chill
Foes noisily insist on decibel limits. Fans say they're a nature-friendly part of Florida heritage.
By John-Thor Dahlburg, Times Staff Writer
ON ORANGE LAKE, Fla. � 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.
Foes noisily insist on decibel limits. Fans say they're a nature-friendly part of Florida heritage.
By John-Thor Dahlburg, Times Staff Writer
ON ORANGE LAKE, Fla. � 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.
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