20 years of blood, sweat and tears.

Reflecting on the 20 years you’ve been in business will make you come to many realizations, two of which hit you right off the bat – time really does fly, and you know a lot of dead people. Sitting at the round table in Turtle’s and digging up bones in a treasure chest of old, tobacco stained photos, we stop and laugh at the memories that are instantly brought to mind as though they happened yesterday. And we can’t help but wonder if those memories are as fond to the individuals in the pictures as they are to us.

A Great History

Much like any other business that’s been around a while, so many things have come from the small seed that started it all. Back in 1999 when Tucker Friedman purchased Atchafalaya Basin Landing & Marina, there was no Turtle’s Bar, no airboat swamp tour business, and certainly no website, Facebook page, or blog posts.

As Tucker just mentioned while looking at pictures of houseboats he’s built or docks he’s constructed, he certainly was able to accomplish a lot on his own in his younger days. He should give a shout out, though, to Band-Aid and Coors Light for getting him through those years. There was also so much more
accomplished with the help of others who fell into our life here. The Good Lord certainly knew who to send our way. Too many names to mention, but all those who had a hand in building Turtle’s Bar, the deck, the airboats or the houseboats will always be a part of this place and its success. And we will eternally be grateful.

Where Turtle’s Bar is now located, was once nothing more than a screened-in porch that housed the bait shop for the Marina. Little did those floors know of what characters and memories they would soon hold. The General Store, which now has an extensive gift shop, bait room, and plenty of floor area and restrooms for a busy summer weekend, was once merely a tiny store where you could simply purchase necessities for a day on the water.

A Business Is Born

The airboat swamp tour business came to be innocently enough. Tucker and his friend, Jack Lane, both had purchased airboats, for fun. They were small, 3-4 passenger airboats that they could easily blast off from the landing and into the swamp with a few friends after a long, hot day of work. More and more often, tourists were stopping in and asking for a ride on the airboats. The guys didn’t even charge them. It didn’t take long for them to realize they were on to something, and they couldn’t afford to keep doing it for free – and that marked the beginning of the airboat business.

Jack eventually moved on to follow other work, but Tucker soon purchased the first of our larger airboats, a 6 passenger. Many years have passed since
then, and we now have the largest airboat fleet around, with 5 total. And we aren’t letting up any time soon. We look so forward to the next 20 years and what they have in store for us. So many new people who will come our way and bring just as much joy to us as we hopefully will bring to them.

Many things have changed over the last 20 years. Some changes we laughed about, some we cried about. But we never gave up, and we never will. Our family has grown stronger than ever and now the torch is slowly being passed to the next generation. Tucker may soon finally be able to sit in his rocking chair on the porch and hand out fishing reports-like he keeps saying he wants to do.

We’ll believe it when we see it.