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You might think the scariest part of a duck boat ride would be when it rattles down a boat ramp and plunges into the Potomac River. A storm is on the horizon, and your mom is texting you about a tornado watch from the National Weather Service.

But for me, the scariest part is when the lumbering 14,000 pound bathtub on wheels merges across three lanes of rush-hour traffic on I-395.

The duck driver/captain has handed out noisemaking "quackers" and asks his passengers to help him merge. It is a cacophony of engine noise, shouting and, yes, quacking.

"Go! Go! Go!" yells one of the passengers, as the duck accelerates, reaching its top speed — a roaring 45 mph.

Duck boats have been a fixture on D.C. streets — and in the Potomac River — for years. They're amphibious vehicles built during World War II, and they've shuttled generations of tourists around the monuments.

The Last Duck Ride

D.C.'s ducks — like others around the country — appear to be retiring. The vehicles are more than 70 years old, spare parts have been out of production for many decades, and safety concerns have come to the forefront after a tragic duck sinking in Missouri last year.

I rode along on what will likely be the last ride on a World War II duck in Washington. The man at the wheel, wearing a white sailor's shirt and microphone headset, is Steve Heare — aka Captain Steve.

About a decade ago he had an office job at the Environmental Protection Agency. "I was director of the drinking water protection division," he explains.

His office window looked out over Constitution Avenue.

"As I got near to retirement, I started thinking, 'What can I do that's fun, and not stressful and not managing a bunch of people and not staring at a computer all day?"

As Heare watched the ducks roll by below his window along the National Mall, he thought, "Well gosh, that looks fun."

And it is fun! His tour is a time-tested recipe: one part corny jokes, one part exhaust fumes and and one part history — from Pierre L'Enfant and the design of D.C.'s street grid, to the backstory of the sculptures guarding Memorial Bridge.

Washington's only duck boat company, DC Ducks, has been plying the streets and waters of the nation's capital since at least the 1990s. But the vehicles themselves are much older than that. The one I rode in is one of the newer boats in the fleet, built in 1945.

'They Reckoned Without The Duck'

The ducks weren't designed to carry quacking tourists, but rather weapons and wartime supplies. They were first used en masse — thousands of them — during the Allies' invasion of Sicily in 1943, the first step in the overthrow of Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy. The ducks also played a key role during D-Day, when the Allies invaded France and took on the Nazis.

The name of the boat — duck — actually comes from an acronym.

"The duck, it actually stands for, it's DUKW," explains James Atwater, a curator at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum in Virginia. The D represents the year the vehicle was designed (1942), the U is for utility, the K and W are the codes for front and rear wheel drive. The DUKW was created with a very specific purpose: quickly transferring supplies from larger ships during attacks from the sea.

When the United States entered the war, the Axis powers controlled much of the world, from Norway to Papua New Guinea. Retaking all that territory required transferring masses of soldiers and supplies from sea to land all across the globe, particularly in the island-flecked Pacific.

"The DUKW was a simple design," says Atwater. "They intentionally kept it simple, they intentionally made sure they could produce it quickly and get into mass production and overseas as fast as they could."

The design process took just a few months. Designers at General Motors took their most common military truck, the CCKW, and added a hull around it, waterproof axes, a propeller and rudder. After changing two letters in the name, the somewhat awkward but functional result was the DUKW. General Motors cranked out more than 20,000 during the war. Soldiers quickly turned the acronym DUKW into the nickname, duck.

The ducks had some issues. They were slow and clumsy at sea; weighed down in rough waters, they could easily sink. But they filled a niche. During the 1944 invasion of Nazi-occupied Le Havre, France, duck boats helped transfer some 175,000 tons of cargo to shore.

"The Nazis believed that it would be months before supplies could move through Le Havre, after they had wrecked and demolished the great port almost beyond repair," reads a caption typed on the back of a photo from the time. "They reckoned without the duck."

Ducks Transition To Peacetime Service

When the war was over, thousands of DUKWs were sold as surplus. An enterprising veteran in Wisconsin bought one, and started giving tours on the Wisconsin River in the late 40s. The phenomenon spread to more than a dozen states, entertaining tourists across the nation.

Now, the era of the World War II duck boat tours seems to be coming to an end.

On the ride I went on, there were some tourists speaking Russian, snapping selfies and a couple from North Carolina — newlyweds on a mini-honey moon in D.C. Taylor Parker, who was married just days before, sat in the back of the boat with her arm around her new husband, Patrick Oakes. Parker was not happy to hear this may be the last duck ride in D.C.

"It's my favorite thing to do when I come into the city, and I do it almost every time I come up here because it is super fun and super special. I'm very sad to hear it could possibly be the last one."

Ducks have had their critics for years — there have been numerous crashes, and several tragedies, including last year, when a duck sank in Missouri, killing seventeen people. The sinking was captured on cellphone video, and the disturbing scene was viewed around the world. There were calls for a ban on duck boats, and many news reports on the dangers of ducks.

Duck ridership in D.C. dropped after that, according to Captain Steve Heare. He says DC Ducks plans to put the World War II boats up for sale; other companies around the country have done the same recently.

"They hope to replace these vehicles with a more modern amphibious vehicle," says Captain Steve. "I don't know whether they'll call it Ducks or not, because they won't be ducks."

A spokesperson for DC Ducks didn't respond to requests for comment, but two other employees confirmed Captain Steve's account.

"We've really struggled this year," says Wesley Thomas, who works as a mechanic on the ducks, and who went along on the last ride. "The company, I think, has just made the decision that they've had enough."

Thomas has been around ducks since he was still in middle school — his dad Kent Thomas is a duck captain. "There's just so many memories that I have working with him at the shop, being on the ducks," says Thomas.

Thomas says the maintaining the boats is a lot of work: it's keeping up an antique boat and an antique truck at the same time. "We have to modify and literally sometimes make our own parts," says Thomas.

At the end of Captain Steve's very last tour, he maneuvered the duck into the traffic circle in front of Union Station, hands gripping the metal steering wheel, an original from 1945. "No power steering," says Captain Steve. "It actually takes a lot of arm strength."

After parking the vehicle, the captain got a little emotional.

"I really want to thank all of you guys for coming," he told us. "I hope you remember these ducks, these vehicles — our girls, as we call them, all six of them — we're going to miss them."

The small crowd applauded, and quacked their quackers in appreciation.

As for Captain Steve, he says the company offered him a job driving tour buses in the city, but he said no thanks.

"I'm a boat guy," says Captain Steve.

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