How decibel lust is polluting the sailing environment

"I don’t feel comfortable saying we need more regulation on the water. Basically, I’m against it. I don’t want anyone telling me when to put on a life jacket. I hope the do-gooders who every few years try to revive the idea of requiring a license to operate a boat never get their way. And, years after it happened, I’m still mad about being busted by some obnoxious big-city cops, who should have been chasing purse snatchers and drug dealers instead of spoiling the day of sailors returning from a race, on a trumped-up charge of making a wake in a harbor. Since slow-moving sailboats don’t make wakes, it wasn’t hard to get the prosecutor to toss the arrest out, but waiting in line with other defendants (including some of the aforementioned folks in the drug and purse trade) gave me plenty of time to ruminate on how unpleasant it can be when the regulators lay their heavy hands on our pursuit of the free enjoyment of the water in our boats.

In spite of all that, I say we need a new federal law regulating boats and vigorous enforcement (to a point just short of being Draconian) of related state laws. I’m talking about powerboat noise laws.

The federal government should mandate that every powerboat be built with a muffler. Then boats would at least leave the factory with their noise-making ability under control, and states would be better able to enforce their own boat noise laws.

This is needed because a certain class of powerboats—the muscle boats, hot rods of the sea, sport boats equipped with fabulously powerful engines, sometimes generically referred to as cigarette boats—is fouling the aural environment of coastal waters with noise so extreme no one should have to tolerate it. It affects shore dwellers, swimmers and sunbathers, fishermen and people on quiet powerboats, but its intrusion in the marine world is especially offensive to sailors.

Sailors, who add no noise to the environment themselves, are vulnerable to the effects of exhaust sound of high-powered boats because a good part of our enjoyment derives from listening to the environment—the play of the waves against the hull, the wind in the rigging, the cries of seabirds. Try hearing that when the noisemakers are thundering by.

Sailors used to think personal watercraft were the enemy. They’re not. They’re an annoyance, as small insects are an annoyance. The enemy is bigger and louder. If PWC are gnats, the cigarette boats are giant wasps mutated to emit explosive sounds the human ear was not designed to hear.

I don’t mean to disparage the boats themselves. Many of them are beautifully engineered and surprisingly seaworthy (they can venture offshore, which makes it harder to escape their nuisance). There’s nothing wrong with speed. Many of us find it admirable in cars and even in sailboats (if that sedate sort of velocity can be called speed), and if the owners of cigarette boats get their jollies flying across the waves at 50 knots, well, as they say, more power to them.

But the noise: It’s bad enough that they’re loud beyond any reasonable standard; what’s really grating is that they don’t have to be. They can go just as fast with mufflers. Some owners buy boats without mufflers, others remove them from engines that were supplied with them and others install muffler bypasses to ramp up the decibel level at the flick of a switch, because, for them, the appeal is the noise. Whether disturbing the peace in a marina or anchorage with prolonged idling—sounds like cherry bombs detonating at half-second intervals—or roaring across open water trailing a cacophonous smear, it’s all about showing off.

My favorite cigarette boat name, painted boldly on the topsides of an occasional visitor to our harbor, is (I’m not making this up) Mine’s Bigger. I like it because it fits the type perfectly. You can draw your own conclusions about the mentality at work here, but I think what the owner is really trying to say is Mine’s Louder.

A federal muffler requirement wouldn’t make the likes of Mine’s Bigger or Louder any quieter, but it would result in a new generation of high-performance powerboats that don’t destroy the quiet of the marine environment. A group that exists to protect that environment, Bluewater Network, has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to require mufflers. Bluewater’s executive director, incidentally, is Russell Long, a sailor whose resume includes America’s Cup competition.

It’s significant that another organization calling for a muffler mandate is the National Association of State Boating Law Administrators. It’s an indication of the extent of the problem that state authorities are asking for help in fighting extreme powerboat noise in their waters.
This is a loud world. On land it’s hard to escape the din of unmuffled motorcycles (the terrestrial equivalent of cigarette boats), car stereos with the base tuned up to earth-moving levels, the fellow in the check-out line hollering into a cell phone with a lousy connection, you name the insult to your ears. On the water, it ought to be easy. That’s one of the reasons we go there.

I have no illusions that a new federal law would restore peace anytime soon to the waters claimed as playgrounds by the Mine’s Louder set. But besides putting the responsibility on manufacturers to produce boats that meet a reasonable noise standard, it would be a statement that it is wrong to pollute the marine environment with noise.

And wrong it is. Sailors, above all, have a right to say that. We claim the moral high ground because we’re not part of the problem. We’re not like neighbors with dueling leaf blowers, adding to the din while complaining about it. Sailboats do nothing to disturb the quiet or the sounds of nature. The burden is on the noisemakers to put a cork in it ... or a muffler on it.

In the meantime, there is still one way to escape the racket—sail far enough offshore. At some point you’ll leave the noise behind. It’s not that noisemakers can’t go far offshore. Their owners just aren’t inclined to—there’s not a big enough audience to impress out there.