amphibious tour boston

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Everything To Know About the Boston Duck Boats and Tours

From Boston’s historic homes to the bustling waterfront, it can be a little overwhelming to make sure you hit all of the city’s most noteworthy sites . But there isn’t much of a better way to fit everything in than the Boston Duck Tours.

Since 1994, the “duck” boats have been a staple in the Massachusetts capital, carrying thousands of passengers in peak season across the city. Today, the fleet consists of 28 replica World War II amphibious landing vehicles that take you through Boston and into the Charles River. Here’s everything you need to know about one of Boston’s most popular tours.

Hit numerous sites in 80 minutes

With tours taking place every day from the end of March through the end of November, the Boston Duck Tours run every 20-30 minutes (depending on departure area) from 9am to about an hour before sunset. Passengers have the ability to get tickets and board at three locations, including the Prudential Center, Museum of Science and the New England Aquarium.

Once onboard, local drivers take guests on an 80-minute tour of the city, hitting numerous historical and significant sites along the way. You’ll slow down to see the Boston Public Gardens, Beacon Hill, JFK Residence, the Old State House and more than 20 other sites.

During the ride, the quirky ConDUCKtors spew out historical facts and interesting tidbits. Each guide takes on a different persona, bringing a unique – and often humorous – twist to the tour. There’s Bobby Oar, Vincent Van Duck, Robin the Riveter, Lenient Louis the Plunderless Privateer, Captain Super Swift and a crew of many other characters.

While the New England Aquarium boats take a slightly different route than the Prudential Center and Museum of Science rides, they see most of the same places. The Prudential Center and Museum of Science boats are also equipped to give tours in nine different languages and are wheelchair accessible.

Get on the Charles River

One of the more popular locations along the ride puts visitors right into the Charles. At different points on the trip (depending on your boarding spot), the “Duck” turns from truck to boat, and the drivers take passengers on a 20-minute glide over the river.

Entering the river around the Museum of Science, participants see Boston’s West End and Beacon Hill neighborhoods from the water before cruising under the famous Longfellow Bridge. The excursion gives wide, sweeping views of the Boston and Cambridge skylines and intimately displays the Back Bay, including the beautiful Esplanade, before turning back.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be one of the several passengers picked to drive the boat along the river portion of the tour.

Ride in a little piece of history

While the present-day boats are all replicas, the Boston Duck Tours started with an original fleet of World War II amphibious landing vehicles that were converted for passengers. Code-named “DUKW” (which is where the current name comes from), the last original WWII vehicle was taken out of the fleet in 2014, but the company still owns one for special occasions.

The replicas are known as “truck ducks.” First built in Kansas, these models were purposely made for tourism and have a stronger hull with an enclosed top. The oldest boat dates back to 2006 with the newest being from 2014.

To localize the fleet, the company named each of the 28 duck boats after a Boston landmark or neighborhood, with the name painted along the side of the vehicle. Boats include Back Bay Bertha, Beacon Hilda, Espla Nadia, Olga Ironsides, Symphony Hal, Fenway Fanny and many others.

Ride in the same boats as Boston’s champions

Starting in 2002 with the New England Patriots’ first Super Bowl win, Boston Duck Tours and its boats became the “Official ChampionSHIP” of Boston’s four major sports teams. Whenever one of Boston’s teams wins a championship, the company sends out its “Rolling Rally,” a parade that consists of almost the whole fleet and welcomes the players onboard to travel around the city among crowds of cheering fans.

The duck boats have hosted the championship parade a total of 12 times between all four sports teams since 2002, including six times for the Patriots, four times for the Red Sox and one each for the Bruins and Celtics.

On the day of the championship parade, the summer tours are shut down, and all the boats go towards hosting the rally. In the case of the Patriots, whose Super Bowl parade is in the winter, the fleet is brought back into service for one day in February to celebrate. After you’ve experienced Boston Duck Tours, why not check out our list of the must-visit attractions in Boston .

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The Military Roots of the Duck-Boat Tour

How an army vehicle became a tourist favorite

Boston’s Newbury Street is quiet and leafy; high-end stores peek out between sidewalk cafes, where stoppers sit outside, soaking up the sun.

But from down the street lumbers an army utility vehicle, painted tarp-blue and piloted by a man in sunglasses and a tattered red bandana. He goes by the name Captain WeirdBeard . He lets out a strange sound: Quack ! His 32 passengers join in. They all wave as they trundle by the shoppers.

The Boston Duck Tours are truly unabashedly bizarre. But they’re also far from an uncommon sight. Rain or shine, the 28 boats in the fleet take to the city’s streets and waterways, each captained by a character who tosses back equal shares of personality and Boston history to all aboard. The tours wend their way past the usual landmarks: the Hancock Tower, the Make Way for Ducklings sculptures, the Boston Public Library.

But on the swanky Newbury Street, “getting folks there to quack and wave back is the main goal,” one captain told The Gainesville Sun in 1995.

For such a tongue-in-cheek institution, duck boat tours have a surprisingly somber origin: World War II.

In 1942, the U.S. military was faced with a quandary: with the war ongoing, soldiers stationed overseas were in need of supplies and reinforcements. But by that point, most of Europe’s harbors were in tatters; the military couldn’t get close enough to land to reach the troops. In response, General Motors developed the DUKW—a military-grade vehicle able to operate on both land and water, whose finest moment would come about during the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944.

The name DUKW derived from military equipment coding : D stood for the year of production (1942); U denoted its amphibious quality; K indicated front-wheel drive capability; W rear-wheel drive. Unsurprisingly, they just became known as “ducks.”

These days, Boston is one of several cities that operate such tours. But they got their start in rural Wisconsin. After the war ended in 1945, the military made surplus supplies available for public purchase. Bob Unger, a veteran from Milwaukee, snapped up a DUKW, which he had learned to pilot during the war. Where he saw an army relic, his fried Mel Flath saw a business opportunity. Flath convinced Unger to bring his DUKW to the Wisconsin Dells—the scenic landscape surrounding the southern portion of the Wisconsin River. They launched their first tour as the Wisconsin Ducks in the summer of 1946, says Dan Gavinski, now the general manager of company.

By the next season, the tour company operated 37 DUKWs. Today, the Wisconsin Ducks, Gavinski says, has the largest fleet of DUKWs in the country, and their 91 vehicles still date from the Second World War.

The Wisconsin Ducks take pride in the label “original”—the company can lay undisputed claim to the first amphibious tour in the country. But the relaxed vibe of the backcountry routes is a far cry from the rambunctious, arguably more notorious tours that wind their way through at least 30 cities worldwide.

In that respect, the Boston Duck Tours, which launched in 1994, were the first. “A lot of people think that we’re the original,” says the CEO Cindy Brown. “But we always make sure to yield to Wisconsin.”

The move to an urban setting was not exactly smooth sailing. According to the company , bringing DUKWs to Boston “took nearly two years, ‘100 halls of government,’ and fierce determination by an ex-banker [the founder Andy Wilson] who felt that there was more to life than the standard 9-5, corporate world.” Securing the 30 municipal permits necessary to operate the tours was a veritable nightmare “due to the infamous bureaucratic red tape, but also because most people had never heard of Ducks and simply thought the idea of a land/water tour in Boston was crazy.”

The tours turned out to not be so crazy after all; during peak season, they now ferry around 4,500 passengers per day. But they are, Brown says, decidedly quirky. The drivers are encouraged to cultivate distinctive personalities, often so effectively that Brown says she sometimes finds herself calling them by their aliases around the office.

Other cities soon followed. Ride the Ducks was founded in Branson, Missouri, in 1977 and operated a rural route, but in 2003, it launched in Philadelphia and Stone Mountain, Georgia, a town outside of Atlanta, where the company is now headquartered. Many urban duck tours, like those in Seattle and Austin, operate independently, but Ride the Ducks is a franchise, complete with a production subsidiary called Amphibious Vehicle Marketing, which provides modern iterations of the WWII DUKWs to companies like Boston Duck Tours.

This interconnectedness, Brown says, is a testament to both the peculiarity of the industry and to its tiny size. “As you can imagine, there aren’t many duck tours out there,” she says. While that closeness fosters a sense of universality among these very location-specific tours, it also causes any backlash against the industry to amplify.

Over the course of their relatively short history, DUKW tours have come under fire for a number of fatal accidents. Thirteen people drowned in 1999 after a boat operated by Land and Lake Tours, Inc. malfunctioned on Lake Hamilton in Arkansas ; the company has since dissolved. Philadelphia has been the site of two accidents: one in 2010 , and one in 2015 —a year which also saw a deadly crash in Seattle , after an axel failure cause a DUKW boat to crash into a bus. “If there’s an accident in one place, all the companies are implicated,” Brown says. “And because our industry is a little bit unique, when something does happen, it becomes a front-page story.”

Yet despite the challenges, duck tours are buoyed by their weirdness, which often comes from the drivers themselves. The industry has a surprising sticking power. Boston is currently training 11 new drivers. Over a six-to-eight-week period, aspiring guides take lessons in driving, history, safety, and theatrics. Most of them stay in it for the duration: some of the current drivers have been in the business for over 15 years, Brown says. (She’s been with the tours for 21 years; Gavinski started with the Wisconsin Ducks as a 14-year-old ticket collector in 1971).

Underneath all the flare, guides try to do justice by their cities. In Londonist last month, the writer Will Noble described how his trip aboard a DUKW, bolstered by his guide’s “occasional bouts of flippancy,” left even him—a seasoned Londoner—ever-so-slightly more knowledgeable about his city. “It was good to have a guide who can ramble on a bit like that,” one of Noble’s fellow passengers said. “He was like Stephen Fry.”

This article appears courtesy of CityLab .

Where to buy tickets for Bruins vs. Maple Leafs Game 7 in Boston

• Updated: May. 02, 2024, 10:45 p.m. |
• Published: May. 02, 2024, 10:43 p.m.
• MassLive.com Staff

The Maple Leafs have won two straight elimination games to force a Game 7 with the Boston Bruins in the opening round of the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs.

The Leafs are riding into Boston with all the momentum after their 2-1 win Thursday, but B’s fans have the home-ice advantage on Saturday night as the Garden is expected to be rocking for the win-or-go-home contest. Fans looking to pack the Garden for the 8 p.m. ET puck drop can already head over to StubHub or VividSeats to shop around for the best seat in the house , or the most affordable one.

As of late Thursday night, the lowest ticket on StubHub was going for $221 , while the lowest on VividSeats was going for $223.

The B’s were up 3-1 in the series before the Leafs took Game 5 in Boston and Game 6 in Toronto. Game 7 airs on ABC at 8 p.m. ET on Saturday, May 4, which fans can stream for free thanks to a free trial at FuboTV.

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