Newport Beach Culture Runs on Juice and Harbor’s Silent Duffys

I was on the trail of professional goofball Dennis Rodman one night in Newport Beach, chatting with a bartender about the former basketball player’s frequent dust-ups, when I noticed a floating party pull into the docks out back of the restaurant.

Several people who appeared to be having the time of their lives disembarked and came in for a drink. Later, when the boat departed, some passengers stayed behind and others took their place.

By then I’d lost interest in Rodman. I went out to the dock and watched the boat tie up at the next bar down the channel, where the scene was repeated. And I knew this was the life for me.

The Newport Beach tradition of bar-hopping by boat goes back decades, and a man named Marshall “Duffy” Duffield is at the center of it. More than 30 years ago, Duffy was a teenager who putted around the harbor in his dad’s little motorboat, often impressing young ladies with his navigational skills.

When the gas-powered motor conked out on him one day, Duffy eyeballed an electric golf cart and wondered why you couldn’t make a boat run on a battery, too. After some tinkering, he had invented an electric boat, now known simply as the Duffy.

It’s the perfect Newport harbor boat because it goes just 5 mph, which happens to be the speed limit. It’s so quiet, you can pull up alongside other boaters and trade offshore tax shelter information. And it’s small enough that you can maneuver into a restaurant dock with a margarita in one hand.

Marshall Duffield didn’t just invent a boat, he invented a culture.

“We’ve sold over 1,000 of them, just in Newport alone,” says Duffy, who tells me there are trust-fund babies out there who aren’t known to have done anything in decades other than cruise the bay. “On a weekend, you can walk across the harbor, going from one Duffy boat to another.”

Duffy kindly prepared a list of seven universally acknowledged kings of the Duffy scene. Scott Sarkisian, one of the first I called, said to meet him at his slip on Balboa Island at 5 o’clock sharp, cocktail hour on the bay.

Sarkisian, who owns a metal-refinishing business, arrived with liquid refreshment and a platter of sushi and cracked crab from the Bluewater Grill. His boat is tied up at a friend’s weekend home, which Sarkisian uses as a $4.5-million ice chest. He popped in for some ice cubes because, on a Duffy, you don’t want to be without a cocktail between bars.

Sarkisian, nattily attired in shorts and ruby-red loafers, hit the switch on his 16-foot Duffy Electric--which has a mesh top to filter the setting sun--and we were on our way.

“This is the best way to end a day,” he said, a claim that could not be argued against. The water was flat and the sky low, shorebirds skimming a soft horizon. “If you want a stress reducer, this is it.”

My pilot was no ordinary helmsman. Sarkisian, a charming kibitzer known by some as the mayor of the harbor, is a three-time winner of the Great Duffy Electric Boat Race, a combination treasure hunt and rally held each June. This year, his team drubbed a field of 57 other crews, because Sarkisian knows intimately the miles of waterways around Balboa, Newport, Harbor, Lido and Bay Islands.

The on-board bar was open as we veered out of the South Bayfront neighborhood and into the Turning Basin and Main Channel.

“You can toss the shrimp tails into the water,” Sarkisian advised, enjoying a Mount Gay rum on the rocks. “They’re biodegradable.”

Unless you’re driving into bridge supports or falling out of the boat, harbor police don’t bother busting these floating cocktail parties. There are so many of them, they’d need backup from the Navy and the National Guard.

“I could point out the homes of all my girlfriends and ex-fiancees,” offered Sarkisian, who is single at 51. The Duffy makes a great first date, he says, because it serves as an icebreaker. From a bar, you can point out to the dock at your carriage and say, “Let’s go for a boat ride.”

You can kill a couple of hours on the water just wondering whether you slept late the day all these other folks figured out how to buy $10-million weekend homes and yachts the size of hotels.

“That used to be John Wayne’s house,” Sarkisian said, pointing to a nice little spread at the water’s edge.

Other Duffys were out on the water now with their little canopy tops, cutting small wakes across the slow-motion universe. One boat was done up in a Polynesian theme, with hula girl cutouts glued to the craft. The passengers wore Hawaiian shirts, which are very, very big in Newport. Almost as big as white duck pants and early-bird specials.

There’s a tradition of giving Duffy boats names with an electrical reference, and the Polynesian affair was called Teenie Wattheenie. Sarkisian, who has a lone hula girl planted on the bow of his cabin, pilots Schock-Ah.

“We’re going to go pick up a couple of friends of mine,” he said as we headed for the Newport Boulevard Bridge and Balboa Coves, where Marco and Gale Baljeu live. He called them on his cell phone, and they came through the back of their house and walked down to the dock with some cold beer.

This is how you get together with friends in Newport. They hop into your boat and you have a drink on the way to Billy’s at the Beach, the Cannery, the Bluewater Grill, the Rusty Pelican, the Elks Lodge or the American Legion hall, among other joints with a place to tie up.

As we floated through narrow waterways, under bridges, and past hundreds of backyards, Sarkisian and the Baljeus knew virtually everyone, whether they saw them on their back deck or called out to them in another Duffy.

It was the antithesis, it struck me, of Southern California living.

No cars. Lots of mingling. And everyone knows everyone else.

“It’s like having a floating living room,” said Marco, and your neighbors are always dropping in unannounced.

We had a pop at Billy’s, where the Teenie Wattheenie crew was dining, and then cruised over to the Bluewater for dinner, passing fleets of Duffy Electrics along the way.

“Where you guys going?” Sarkisian called out to a boatload of friends.

“We don’t know,” they called back.

Every week, they hang a sign at Duffy’s store on the Coast Highway, paying tribute to the best boat name of the week.

All-time greats include Bay Watts, Circuit de Soleil, Cutty Spark, Raging Watters, Salt N Battery, Sherlock Ohms, Shock Cousteau, Socket To Me, and Voltswagon.

And then there’s this one, which sums it all up:

Watt A Life.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.