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."
