Hanging around the docks, detailing pleasure boats for an affluent crowd, 16-year-old John Arruda never dreamed that he would some day operate one of the most innovative marine shops in the country.

“I thought that if I was lucky, I might make it some day as a boat captain,” said the 36-year-old president of Turbine Marine, Inc. “All I knew is that I wanted to someday work with performance powerboats.”

Arruda grew up in Oslo, Norway where his father, an F-4 fighter pilot, had been stationed at a NATO base. After retiring from the U.S. Air Force, the senior Arruda opened a small Evinrude/Johnson outboard motor dealership.

“We had mostly small engines, 25 hp to 75 hp,” Arruda recalled. “Most of the boats over there were small. There was nothing like we had over here.”

When Arruda moved back to the United States in 1986 and moved to Hollywood, Fla., he could not believe all the big, beautiful, fast boats.

“I had a passion for powerboats,” he said. “The only problem was that I didn’t have the money to buy one.”
Disinterested in school, Arruda dropped out and headed to the water looking for a job, any job, which would get him closer to the boats that he loved.

“That’s when I started detailing boats,” he said. “It wasn’t long before that turned into a pretty good business. But it still wasn’t enough. I wanted to be inside the boat, not outside cleaning it.”

So Arruda hit the books and eventually earned a 100-ton captain’s license. He landed a series of jobs and eventually established himself as the man in charge of sausage tycoon Jimmy Dean’s motor yacht.
But that still wasn’t enough.

Yachts are nice, but they are not fast. Arruda had the go-fast bug and the only way to cure it was to get in a performance boat.

“I found a partner and we bought a 33-foot Donzi,” he said. “Pretty soon I was doing charters…taking people on poker runs all over South Florida. It was a blast.”

But that still wasn’t enough.

Arruda loved his Donzi, but he didn’t like repairing the piston engine. “You know the problem with piston engines?” he asked rhetorically. “They break.”

So in his spare time, Arruda started tinkering with turbine engines in his small rigging shop. A customer came by one day and saw him playing with a surplus helicopter engine.

“He convinced me to take the piston engines out of his boat and install the turbines,” he said. “From that point on, there was no turning back.”

Word spread quickly through the tight-knit performance boating community that there was a young guy in Pompano Beach doing crazy things with surplus helicopter engines that he bought from the U.S. military.
“We go over every engine and rebuild it from the ground up,” Arruda said. “When we get done with it, it is ready for flight.”

Soon, everybody wanted Arruda’s turbine engines. Piston boats can be fast, but not nearly as fast as a cat powered by twin Cobra attack helicopter engines.

Then one day, Arruda pulled up to the dock during the Sarasota Poker Run in a 46-foot Skater called “Hell Fire.” John Haggin, founder of AMF Offshore Racing, was there in his 51-foot Outerlimits called “Animal House”, a piston boat that Arruda had rigged in his own shop.

“Haggin took one look at that boat and he wanted one,” Arruda recalled. “Two weeks later I had a check in my hand and we converted the boat to turbines.”

Once Haggin had a taste of the speed, he wanted more. That is how AMF Offshore Racing was born.
In the years that followed, Arruda would rig three more race boats for the AMF crew.

His latest creation: a 50-foot Mystic powered by twin, 2000 hp turbines.

Arruda said that boat should cruise at well over 200 mph, a speed previously unimaginable on an offshore race course.

When asked if he has finally limited out his technology, Arruda laughed.

“Limit?” he asked. “There is no limit.”