A measurement of the acoustic ambient arriving from a horizontal direction along with total acoustic intensity spectra allows one to infer both the total directional spectra and some physical characteristics of the sources of “sea surface sound.” A long‐term measurement of these two quantities was made at high frequency, i.e., 8 to 64 kHz, in the Tongue of the Ocean, The Bahamas. The horizontally directed ambient was measured using vertically oriented line arrays and was observed for wind speeds ranging from 1 to 30 kn. The resulting database was used to estimate the statistics of anisotropic “noise gain” relative to the isotropic noise gain. The resulting normalized array performance was found to be a continuous function of total acoustic intensity and a discontinuous function of wind speed. Differences in the functional dependence and residual statistics were found for two cases: whitecaps present or not present. The relation of these results to the total directional spectra and a model of the near‐surface distribution of acoustic sources are discussed.