Pacemaker, Wahoo or Alglas, by any name it’s still a Jersey legend.
In the heart of Pines, not far from where Mother Leeds gave birth to her 13th child and cursed him the devil, there is a property along the banks of the Great Mullica River in Lower Bank where sits the old Pacemaker Yachts. If the ground could talk, it would have countless stories of boat building history, innovation and fishing stories.
To give you a little history of Pacemaker yachts, it was owned by the Leek family who has been building boats on the Mullica River since 1712. It started out as C. P. Leek & Sons Inc. where they built a variety of custom fishing boats during prohibition. In 1948, C. P. along with his sons John E. and Cecil started Pacemaker Corp. and produced a 29-foot wooden fishing boat designed by Lockwood Haggas. A few years later, a variety of other size boats were designed by David Martin.
John had two sons, Jack and Donald, who both worked at Pacemaker and built it into one of the largest boat manufacturers on the east coast after John E.’s passing in 1957.
A Sixties Classic
In 1966, Pacemaker, with Don and Jack at the helm, created an all fiberglass line called Alglas. The first boat was a 25-foot sedan with a fly bridge; the mold coming off an older wooden Pacemaker Sea Skiff. That was a trend setter, and they sold over a thousand boats that first year. Later that year, they introduced a 25-foot center console version called the Wahoo which was molded off of Harold “Piney” Parker’s wooden C.P Leek which was designed as a 25-foot open sea skiff. The first hull off the mold was given to Parker as a thank you for going in to partners if helping the Wahoo get launched and was named ABC.
The original Pacemaker Alglas Wahoo was 25 feet long with a 9-foot, 6-inch beam and was equipped with a single inboard that had a 145-horsepower Chrysler engine with a cruising speed of 20 mph that could top out at 26 mph, fed by 33-gallon fuel tanks. If you wanted to, you had the option to upgrade to a 225-horsepower V8 Chrysler engine.
The early Wahoos from 1966 to 1970 were all soft chines (round bottom) with a full keel for propeller protection that only drafted 1 foot, 2 inches of water.
In 1972, the Wahoo was redesigned and stretched to 26 feet long with 9-foot, 10-inch beam. It still had a full keel but a new hard chine, squarer bottom, and an elevated helm with a bathroom and a sink underneath. The elevated helm was for better visibility when running and fishing. This also came with your two choices of engines, either a single 225-horsepower V8 Chrysler with a cruising speed of 25 mph and top speed of 32 mph, or the twin 145-horsepower Straight 6 Chryslers with a speed of 22 mph that topped out at 28mph. Both featured dual 55-gallon tanks and a draft of 1 foot, 5 inches of water.
The full keel made both versions of the Wahoo a cult favorite for South Jersey striper fishermen that loved to fish the rips and whitewater of our rough inlets. Having grown up on the Historic Tuckerton Creek (crick, if you’re a local) was only a 15-minute garvey ride to historic Beach Haven. There was a time when driving the boat in the intracoastal waterway you’d see Wahoos in all the marinas or on the dock weighing in the day’s catch at the Beach Haven Marlin and Tuna club, or the yacht club in Beach Haven.
3-Letter Cult
There have also been a few Wahoo boats in the area that if you say their names too loud, you’d scare every fish away. Some of those names include ABC, IOU, NET and XYZ, all of which were or still are out of Beach Haven and are the soft chine style. There’s an unspoken rule that if you own a round bottom Wahoo it can only be a three letter name. I remember seeing them in the fall striper run bouncing their keels of the bottom of the inlet in the whitewater, pulling stripers over the sides, knowing only Wahoos can get to where they’re fishing.
Ever since I was a young boy I always wanted a Wahoo to call my own. In 2014, my father and I started looking high and low for a hard chine Wahoo. We saw totally restored versions for $40,000, all the way down to ones with holes in the hull. In 2016, we finally found a 1977 twin inboard Wahoo for the right price; it needed work but wasn’t major repairs. We took out the original Chrysler engines and replaced them with two, brand-new 150-horsepower marine power engines, painted the hull and topside, new t-top, outriggers and electronics.
I love running the boat up and down Long Beach Island, as it’s such a head turner for everyone that sees it. My best memory of the Wahoo so far is my father and I were trolling for stripers off the Red Tower in Beach Haven. It was only us and another Wahoo, IOU, as the rest of the fleet at the time was fishing north around Barnegat Light. It was a flat calm day and the bunker were so thick the depthfinder couldn’t read the bottom. It was one of those days when you could smell and see the oil slick.
| LBI MEMORIES |
| The craze started with Walter Johnson (XYZ), Bill Webster (IOU) and Drew and Mark Parker (ABC), all Alglas; they mostly had three-letter names. Generally it was all about trolling bucktails with pork rinds in the breakers for stripers. Then Bass Buster George taught Walter to anchor up and cast bunker chunks into the white water in 1996.
– Dave Bentley (REBAIT). |
Just as my dad said we’re going to hook up soon, the one reel started screaming and I quickly started reeling it in. The fish took four big runs and I thought we might be hooked up a rogue bluefin tuna. But as the fish got closer to the boat we saw this was a once in a lifetime striper. My dad quickly looked for the gaff (this of course was when gaffing stripers was allowed) but couldn’t find it, so he grabbed the net; we only got half the striper into the net when the net broke due to the weight of the fish. But we still got the striper over the side of the Wahoo, all 64 inches and 54 pounds of it. It was the biggest striper either of us ever saw let alone caught.
We quickly put the striper on ice and steamed are way home. It was a fish of a lifetime and a memory I will never forget, just me, my dad, and our Wahoo.
