Last year I stopped in at West End, Bahamas... and lo and behold a mega-yacht owned by a principal of one of the worlds largest computer software companies pulled-up to the teehead next to the slip I was in and ran his mega-genset for several hours.

After several hours, I asked for the captain and asked him if he intended to run the genset all night long as the sound was quite strongly reverberating inside of my boat and was equating to the inside of a kettle drum being played during the 1812 Overture. The captain told me that yes indeed the genset would run all night as he needed to run the genset to keep the refrigeration going properly. I looked at the exhaust and asked if 60-100 hp of genset was really needed as that amount would certainly keep a moderate sized slaughter house quite cold. A courteous discussion continued until I simply gave up and announced that since I and my crew couldnt possibly sleep through the noise and since I would be awake all night due to the cacophony of the genset ... would they mind if I practiced my bagpipe all night long? ..... I then got several chairs, the bagpipe, and proceeded to arrange them near/under the 'master's suite' and settled in to force the issue of anti-peace and quite. A few bars of "a truckload of pigs crashing head-on into a truckfull of empty tin cans" on a purposely out of tune bagpipe ... the mega crew was aroused, the mega-yacht relocated to the otherside of the quay .. and this time with the GD genset reverbrating to the quay wall so that only the 'contents' of the mega-yacht could enjoy the noise. BTW - Several of the boat crews in the adjacent slips had also agreed to sing (with gusto) "100 million bottles of beer on the wall" ..... accompanied by a ratty bag-pipe if needed.

I dont play the bagpipe very well at all ... so maybe this also had a good effect, d'ya think.

:-)