Noise

Several years ago Carrie Rose was anchored in an area remote even for the North Channel in Canada’s portion of Lake Huron. The only noise heard was when a large loon suddenly surfaced outside the pilothouse door. It felt like the sub in Red October surfaced next to our little ship, and then it was gone and the silence returned.

It is the only place I have “heard” silence. In response to the lack of sound the brain — at least my brain — began to create sound. For a while, I thought I was suffering from tinnitus. An odd reaction, it bordered on a hallucination.

Now in Maryland waters there have been a couple of quiet anchorages. Hunting Creek and Dividing Cove qualify as such but Maryland is an inherently nosier place than the North Channel. It is more alive. There are schools of rustling minnows skimming the surface, the endless call and refrain between osprey parents and their insatiable children, marauding eagles and crows fended off by whatever smaller birds they are hassling, and wasps trying to find a crevasse to build a muddy nest.

They all contribute to the sound scape. In many places that seem remote, once the anchor is down and Carrie Rose’s rattle has silenced, road noise appears. Tires are the main contributor with Harley Davidson’s unfettered exhaust being the worse offenders. In one quiet anchorage on the Corsica River I settled down to enjoy the silence when a crop duster buzzed by and commenced to spray poison on a nearby field for the afternoon. Watching its acrobatics almost compensated for its commotion.

Carrie Rose is south on the Chesapeake forty miles east of the Potomac River. She sits in an enormous state run marina. It is hard to imagine where the boats were going to come from to fill these slips. This is the land of the low lying sand and marsh islands of Smith and Tangiers. The folk on the Chesapeake, like folk all over the world, over fished, trotlined, netted, dredged, and farmed the life out of the bay. There is talk of a comeback but by then, the kids will have gone to school and be working for financial management companies.

Now that I have said this, remember I am speaking from a Midwesterner’s point of view. In my part of the world the 1850’s is old, here old is the 17th century. People are rooted to tradition in a way that I find hard to imagine. So, if there is a crab to be caught someone will catch it. And if the oysters make a comeback, a dredge will find them. My sense is that the locals know the bottom of the bay better then its surface.

As usual, I have wandered from the original topic, noise. We are in slip G25 at Somer’s Cove Marina in the town of Crisfield, Maryland. Across two wooden piles from us is a trawler slightly larger than Carrie Rose. It has an air conditioner similar to ours that pulls the cold out of the bay’s water and distributes it into the boats interior. To do this it sucks in water from the bottom and spills it back into the bay. The constant stream of water is on our starboard side. It is similar to running a garden hose in your bedroom. Though a little more restrained in the use of air conditioning, we are no different in this if the heat index starts to climb. This noise, often generated by unoccupied boats, has become ubiquitous.

The North Channel had several things going for it that the Chesapeake does not. It is remote; no airplanes traverse its skies. It is generally cool, especial the nights. There is no power available, and except in the direst of circumstances cruisers do not run generators day and night, an ethos followed by the boats that manage to get there.

There are no villains in this tale. We do what we need to do to keep comfortable and thus to keep cruising. This is the whole point after all, to keep plying the water until that silent spot is found, and then to recognize it for the blessing it is.