At the relatively young age of 26, Michigan native Alex Pratt has already owned more offshore muscleboats than most speed fanatics will own in their entire lives. After a succession of Cigarettes, the CEO and philanthropist famously owned a 2020 48′ MTI with his Good Boy Vodka brand emblazoned on the side and ran it at various poker runs across the country. Now he’s nearly finished building his latest masterpiece: a stunning, twin T53 turbine-powered 50′ Mystic he hopes to debut and run at the 2021 Lake of the Ozarks Shootout.
Powered by Mercury Racing 1350/1550 engines, the Good Boy Vodka MTI has since been sold to a buyer in Dubai. The new, canopied Good Boy Vodka—a 2010 model-year hull—is roughly comparable to another 50′ Mystic, the famous Low Altitude currently owned by Pratt’s buddy Jim Branton, which once took back-to-back King of the Desert titles at Desert Storm (when owned by Win Farnsworth). Over the last decade, Pratt’s boat has had a couple of owners, most recently Chris Cox (the poker-run aficionado who famously owned the 50′ Mystic cat Envy, as well as the 40′ Platinum Superheat). When Pratt struck the deal with Cox, his plans for the Mystic were modest. Then things started to snowball.
“When I bought it, I was just going put some stickers on it,” he says. “Then we started talking about putting on a full wrap. Then I thought, maybe I should just paint the boat. And then, since we were investing a lot of money in it anyway, I started thinking about doing a redesign. Then I started thinking about replacing a lot of stuff, and the project started to get way out of control!”
Ultimately, the boat was completely stripped and the turbines were removed. “We blocked it down to a bare carbon hull,” Pratt says. “We then redid everything—re-epoxied it, repainted it and had the turbines rebuilt at Marine Turbine Technology in Louisiana. They’re going through the boat right now, reinstalling all of the electrical components, voltage regulators, etc. Then they will reinstall the fully rebuilt turbine engines. It’ll be like a brand-new boat when we’re finished with it.”
Another cool change Pratt made to the Mystic involved the seating configuration. “The boat was originally a six-seater, and I wanted it to be an eight-seater, with two extra seats up front. So we went to John Cosker at Mystic and purchased two additional seats so we didn’t have to replicate them,” Pratt says, adding that his is likely the first-ever Mystic to feature this particular seating arrangement. “We had to cut the boat apart a little bit to make them all fit.” Somewhere down the line, possibly in a year or two, Pratt says he may remove the boat’s capsule entirely to make it an open eight-seater.
“If we do that, then we’ll install a new windshield,” he says. “It’ll be pretty interesting to have an open 50′ Mystic with turbine engines. That’s never been done before, and we think that’d be kind of cool.”
In addition to Good Boy Vodka, the boat’s new graphics feature another key sponsor: X Insurance, owned by Rick Lindsey. “He’s a good friend of mine who I met through some of the guys I do business with. So we’ve got a big ‘X Insurance’ logo on the rear end of the boat. I really appreciate our friendship and partnership on this boat, and his generous sponsorship means a lot to me—it’s more than just co-branding. I want to build awareness to X Insurance and how they can help people and business with their unique offerings in the insurance world. He takes insurance is another level and really finds creative ways to help people. I believe what he’s doing is going to change how people look at insurance. He’s a amazing dude.”
Pratt told Speedboat he expects for the Mystic to be completed in the next three or four weeks, “I want to take it to the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout and run it there,” he says. “I’ll do some advertising and promotion—I’ll take my customers for rides and maybe do some charity events and cool stuff like that. But this is not the kind of boat you show up to at the Sandbar…this is an event boat.”
The Mystic is just the latest chapter in Pratt’s nonstop life. Sixty years ago, his grandfather founded a trailer company that the family sold in 2018; Pratt was kept on to run the sales department. (The company builds container chassis trailers, oil field trailers and other industrial-use trailers and, most recently, tilt trailers for boats.) But to Speedboat readers, Pratt is obviously more famous for his glamorous secondary gig as CEO of Good Boy Vodka, a lifestyle brand spiritually connected to the boating world. “We want to dominate that type of niche market and expand from there,” he says.
And then there’s Pratt’s other personal passion: the Warrior Dog Foundation, which cares for military animals sent overseas to help fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They help rehabilitate those animals when they come back to the U.S. so they don’t have to euthanize them,” Pratt explains. “The foundation makes it so they can be readopted. We just support them and other small shelters. We believe in their mission and one day, when Good Boy Vodka is selling large volumes, we look forward to donating a generous amount.”
Check out photos of both of Pratt’s Good Boy Vodka boats—the MTI and the Mystic—in the slide show below.