Here are some amphibious vehicles. The middle photo depicts the WWII DUKW referred to by GIs as a duck boat. The vehicle on the right is the Branson amphibious vehicle. It is not a WWII DUKW but a cobbled together backyard imitation. This probably falls into the category of “who gives a shit.” But being a student of history it irks me because there is a distinction between the two craft. I might pay to ride in a WWII DUKW because of the historical significance, but not an Acme duck boat.
I commented on another story involving a Duck boat earlier in the month: You-can’t-make-this-shit-up/then-and-now-2/. This also involved a dead body floating in Boston Harbor, by no means an unusual occurrence. The only reason a duck boat was mentioned was that it happened to be the conveyance that transported the witnesses. I described the origins of the Duck boat.
It turns out that the old saying: “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck is untrue, in this case. Here is Wikipedia’s description of the DUKW: The DUKW was designed by Rod Stephens, Jr. of Sparkman & Stephens, Inc. yacht designers, Dennis Puleston, a British deep-water sailor resident in the U.S., and Frank W. Speir from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[8] Developed by the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development to solve the problem of resupply to units which had just performed an amphibious landing, it was initially rejected by the armed services. When a United States Coast Guard patrol craft ran aground on a sandbar near Provincetown, Massachusetts, an experimental DUKW happened to be in the area for a demonstration. Winds up to 60 knots (110 km/h; 69 mph), rain, and heavy surf prevented conventional craft from rescuing the seven stranded Coast Guardsmen, but the DUKW had no trouble,[9] and military opposition to the DUKW melted. The DUKW later proved its seaworthiness by crossing the English Channel.
The final production design was perfected by a few engineers at Yellow Truck & Coach in Pontiac, Michigan. The vehicle was built by Yellow Truck and Coach Co. (GMC Truck and Coach Div. after 1943) at their Pontiac West Assembly Plant and Chevrolet Div. of General Motors Corp. at their St. Louis Truck Assembly Plant; 21,147 were manufactured before production ended in 1945.[9]
It is likely that in the beginning, the original duck boat tours used military surplus DUKW. However, production stopped 73 years ago. It would seem unlikely that many are still in operation. There is a company in Chicago that sells, services and restores DUKWS. The company does not service non-military origin amphibious vehicles.
It turns out that the “duck boat” in Branson is not a DUKW but a commercially or even backyard approximation of a DUKW, Doomed-duck-boat.
Does this make a difference to the story? Duck, DUKW, smuck who cares? We can’t know if things would have turned out differently, had the duck been a real DUKW. What we do know is that the MSM got a fundamental fact wrong. Keep that in mind, as you go to the next story and ask yourself: what did they get wrong in this story, and the next?