Turbo Duck bucks tradition; a light touch for engine, boat.(Brief Article)

The 36-foot Turbo Duck is bucking a tradition that's been a hard one to get by.

The Turbo Duck, a lobster boat built for Eben Elliot of Wallace, Nova Scotia, is an aluminum boat with an UltraJet water pump hooked up to a 375-hp Caterpillar 3208. While aluminum boats with water jets are common in Pacific Northwest and Alaska fisheries, they are almost unheard of in New England and the Canadian Maritimes.

A couple of part-time fishermen in the Gloucester area have built aluminum boats with water jets and in Port Hood, Nova Scotia, fiberglass boats with water jets have been built by Colindale Boatyard, but this is probably the first aluminum boat with a water jet for a full-time fisherman.

ABCO, a Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, boatyard, built the Turbo Duck. Besides being the builder of what may be the first aluminum jet-powered fishing boat in Canada, ABCO can also lay claim to building the first fiberglass commercial fishing vessel, a 36-foot Cape Islander in 1963, says ABCO president John Meisner.

Elliot's boat was designed for the short choppy seas that can kick up in the Northumberland Straits, which lies between Prince Edward Island and the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia shoreline. At 49-degrees, the hard chine hull has a fairly sharp entrance and strong V-sections in the bow to cut through most of the chop plus a lot of flare in the topsides to throw the water back. At a point 10 to 12 feet in front of the transom, much of the deadrise has been lost and by the time the transom is reached, the bottom is left with 15 degrees of deadrise. The boat draws 18 inches.

The Turbo Duck has a very distinctive stem profile and a wheelhouse that's pushed pretty far forward to provide plenty of deck space. She carries 110 traps within a 12' 4" beam that's carried from about amidships all the way to the transom.

Most lobstermen, especially in New England, are accustomed to using hydraulically powered sheaves to haul traps aboard. Elliot, however, uses a capstan to haul his traps. It's located on the port washboard, about halfway to the transom. The hydraulic pump for the capstan runs ...