Myrtle Beach boat captain shares love of water and the tale of a customer with Dracula’s teeth

The way Doug Allen talks, it’d be impossible to know that working as a boat captain was a late-in-life career for him. He knows everything along Myrtle Beach’s Intracoastal Waterway — where local celebrities and politicians live, the best places to eat and the most secluded beaches to stop off on for an afternoon.

Many of his customers love his fledgling business, he says, a fact he backs up with how many of them have booked with him again and again. When he takes people out, he starts by asking them what they want to see out of their trip. Sightseeing? The beach? A pub crawl?

The goal is to make each trip as enjoyable as possible for his customers. His boat’s name is even Makin M’emorys.

“If anybody’s in this business just make money, they’re in it for the wrong reasons,” Allen said. “The very first thing I do when people get on my boat is say, ‘This is your boat. What do you want to do? Tell me. I’ll make it happen if I can.’ It’s about making their day enjoyable. Not about me.”

His trips are so beloved he’s even had a customer he refers to as “Dracula” book with him three times, despite the fact that all of Allen’s trips are, well, during the day.

“He looks like Bela Lugosi,” Allen said, referring to the actor known for playing Dracula in the 1931 movie of the same name. “He actually has fangs. He actually has them glued on or whatever. ... He doesn’t come dressed like Dracula, but he’s got the teeth.”

Captaining chartered boat trips is still a relatively new career for Allen, who started using an online service a year and a half ago to generate customers for his business, Allen Adventure Charters. The service, GetMyBoat, considers itself akin to Airbnb. Customers can book online or through an app, scrolling through options for boat rentals and chartered trips like deciding between beachfront condos on Airbnb.

Allen said he appreciates the app’s ability to let him grow his own business. Even though it’s still a relatively new service — there are only 10 listings in the Myrtle beach area — he doesn’t have much trouble staying busy.

His minimum trip length is three hours, and he usually ends up with two four-hour boat rides each day he works. He charges $150 an hour and can take on up to 10 people on his 22-foot Stingray. For a four-hour trip, that can end up being just $60 a person.

“A year and a half after I put my boat on (the app), there was three or four more boats, so it’s started a little bit of a new niche,” he said.

Beautiful waves and rough seas

Try as he might, Allen admits not every trip on the water is picture perfect.

He starts out every trip by going over safety procedures and putting life jackets on any small children.

The biggest rule of all? Always listen to the captain. Always.

Allen said his number one job is to ensure the safety of his passengers, and occasionally, something happens on the water and there’s little time to react. Not listening can mean putting yourself or others in a bad spot.

“Whatever the captain says, you do, and you do it without question. You do it immediately,” Allen said. “I’m not trying to scare anybody, but the captain’s God on the water, and you don’t ever question the captain.”

Usually, on that front, everything is smooth sailing. The bigger issues come from mismanaged expectations, Allen said.

Customers on fishing trips sometimes end up catching a lot of fish, but nothing worth eating, for one. Working up an appetite without anything to show for it has frustrated some of his past customers, Allen said. For a lot fishers he takes out, though, it’s less about the catch and more about the activity. Those tend to be the more experienced ones anyway, who understand the unpredictability of what they are doing.

Then, of course, there’s the rain.

Nearly every day during the summer, especially this July, there is a chance of scattered rain clouds and even thunderstorms during the afternoon.

Without warning, a narrow cloud can dump rain on the boat for a few minutes, drenching the seats.

“I tell them, ‘Look, this is a boat. You’re going to get wet,” Allen said he warns customers. “On this waterway, you’re going to hit bad waves that can come up over the bow. You’re possibly going to get rained on.”

Even when there are hiccups, Allen said he’s never had a bad customer.

“It’s a lot of good people — people that want to get on a boat and don’t have the ability to drive a boat, don’t have have a boat to use,” he said. “They just get on the site, and they’re more comfortable with a captain than they are renting their own pontoon.”

A love of the water

Listening to Allen talk about his love of the water, and of boating, it’s a wonder it took him this long to get into it. (His last career before retirement was working at Pirate’s Voyage in Myrtle Beach, though that’s not exactly the same.)

He’s full of tales about how one part of the Intracoastal Waterway used to be used for drug smuggling back in the 1960s. People would stuff drugs into fish to sneak them into port, he said. Or, he’ll talk about one Palmetto tree that for decades had a Civil War cannonball wedged in the middle.

Anytime there are kids on the boat, he’ll let them “drive” it for a bit, too.

“It’s all about growing those relationships with the people you go out with. There’s not a single person I’ve taken out yet that hasn’t said when they come back down again, they’ll give me a call,” Allen said. “They get my business card. And when they do (return), they call me and say ‘Captain Doug, do you remember me?’”

Regardless of how long it took him to get here, he makes the most of his time. Not only is he certified to captain his own boat, he’s also trained and certified to drive yachts and periodically delivers them for customers.

In the next couple of months, he said he might even be piloting a yacht down to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“I haven’t had a bad day on the water. I don’t care what it is,” he said.

But it’s Allen’s young boat captaining service on GetMyBoat that seems to get him the most excited. He talks insistently of his love of meeting new customers, seeing old ones again and embracing the “service” aspect of customer service as much as possible. His entire career, really, from restaurants to Pirate’s Voyage, was all about customer service, he said.

“Businesses that I know along the waterway have been phenomenal since COVID because people wanted to get out, couldn’t go to restaurants, couldn’t go to bars, couldn’t go shopping. So they went towards things outside,” he said. “It’s given opportunity for people like myself to start a business. ... Even post-COVID, with new variants and everything that happens, nobody’s quite sure what to do. And this is a safe and enjoyable option for people that have disposable income to enjoy coming out and doing things that are different than what they’ve done before.”

Allen loves to learn about his customers, their interests and lives. He doesn’t pry, though. When asked if he’d ever inquired “Dracula” about why he had sharpened fangs, Allen had a quick response.

“Heck no,” he said. “That’s private stuff.”