Go-fast boat

A go-fast boat is a small, fast powerboat designed with a long, narrow platform and a planing hull. Depending on definitions used, it is either a speedboat (synonymously) or a certain type of speedboat.

When the United States banned the sale of alcohol in the early twentieth century, these boats were used in "rum-running", transferring illegal liquor from larger vessels waiting outside US territorial waters to the mainland. Their high speed enabled them to avoid interception by law enforcement. The present conception of such boats is based largely on designs by Donald Aronow for offshore powerboat racing in the 1960s. During this period, these boats were also used by drug smugglers to transfer drugs across the Caribbean to the United States.

Name

Go-fast boats are also called cigarette boats or cigar boats—references to their hull shape, to the items that they are (archetypally) used to smuggle (see Illicit cigarette trade and Cuban cigar), or both.

The term "cigarette boat" is especially popular because it is a brand name for a line of go-fast boats that popularized and largely defined the class in the 1960s, made by Don Aronow's Cigarette Racing Team. "Cigar boat" is often preferred because it avoids confusion with that brand.

Although modern go-fast boats postdate the fleet that was used for rum-running during the Great Depression, some of those boats were small and extremely fast, a theme that is shared with later smuggling (such as drug smuggling); thus, go-fast boats are sometimes informally (jocularly) called rum-runners.