The mighty Ducks

Nation's Business, Oct, 1997 by Michael Barrier

Andrew Wilson was a Boston investment banker until 1992, when he gave up the stress of 100-hour work-weeks and embarked on a bus trip across the country to visit family and friends. He stopped in Memphis, Tenn., to see Graceland, the Elvis Presley estate, and there he had a fateful encounter with a "duck" -- an amphibious military vehicle used during World War II -- that had been converted into a sort of tour bus.

It was a few weeks later, after he returned to Boston, that the idea for a duck tour of Boston, one that combined time on land and on water, "hit me like a bolt of lightning," he says.

Wilson had been having on a sailboat and taking guests out on a runabout for water views of the city from the Charles Fiver. "What I put together," he says, "was the duck as a stage, the views from the Charles, and the fact that the history in Boston was so poorly presented" by some of the existing land tours.

Five years later, Wilson, 40, is the proprietor of Boston Duck Tours, which runs 12 ducks. He could run twice that many, he believes, but he doesn't want to test the city's patience, and "my gut tells me that we're maxed out at 12." He expects to carry 300,000 people before the season ends in November and to turn away 100,000 more.

Wilson's ducks don't look much like military vehicles. The ducks are painted different bright colors, and each of the 19 "captains" -- all with Coast Guard licenses -- "takes on his or her own theatrical persona," Wilson says. The ducks, which depart from Prudential Center, take 32 passengers each on an 80-minute tour that passes by many of Boston's landmarks and includes 20 minutes or so on the Charles.

"The hulls are original," he says of his fleet. "With the exception of a couple of gearboxes, the mechanical aspects have been significantly updated."

As cheerful and harmless as his ducks may appear, Wilson had a lot of trouble convicting the city of Boston that he was not leading an amphibious invasion. Duck tours have been around for a long time at vacation spots in the Midwest -- including the entertainment mecca of Branson, Mo., and the scenic Dells of the Wisconsin River -- and they're not unknown in cities, but the idea of a duck tour in Boston aroused skepticism.

They just weren't familiar with the concept," Wilson says. "Literally, people told me I was nuts, that it wouldn't work, that I didn't know what I was doing." In fact, he says, "when I first came up with the idea, I didn't know what I was doing. But I wasn't nuts."

At the start, Wilson didn't even have a duck that he could use to show wary officials what he had in mind. Nine or 10 months into his struggle, though, he hooked up with Manuel Rogers, a Cambridge, Mass., funeral-home owner and military-vehicle corrector who owned a duck.

Rogers helped raise capital for Wilson -- who by then was rapidly running out of money -- and "more importantly," Wilson says, "found another duck that we modified. Because we weren't carrying passengers for hire, we didn't need a single permit, except for a driver's license and a tag."

Wilson thus could give away sample tours to officials and community leaders who had been having trouble visualizing what a duck tour would be like. After that, he says, "It was a lot harder for them to say no."

He finally got the last permit he needed -- to put his ducks onto the Charles River -- in the spring of 1994. By the fall, he had raised $1.25 million in capital from 33 investors; Boston Duck Tours opened for business, with four ducks, in October 1994.

Since then, Wilson says, we've been an overwhelming success. Over 50 percent of the people take our tour because they've heard about it from somebody else." In 1996, in its second full season of operation Boston Duck Tours carried 250,000 riders, with revenues of $3.4 million.

Wilson buys his reconditioned ducks from a tour operator in Branson; a merger of the two companies may occur if Wilson succeeds in opening tours in other cities. He particularly likes the prospects in cities with combinations of history and water, like Philadelphia and London. "I'm a dreamer," he says, "but I'm a dreamer who gets things done."