Metal Shark’s Puerto Rico Fleet Keeps Growing: New Boats for DRNA Rangers and Bomberos, Nearly a Decade of Police Boats

Puerto Rico has quietly become one of Metal Shark’s longest-running customer relationships in the Caribbean, and the past several months have added to it on two fronts at once: a new fleet of tactical patrol boats for the island’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, and a Bomberos Puerto Rico vessel now in service alongside it.

The most recent and best-documented addition is a set of three 36-foot Fearless-class boats delivered to DRNA’s Rangers division, the agency’s uniformed natural-resources enforcement arm. Governor Jenniffer González Colón and DRNA Secretary Waldemar Quiles Pérez marked the delivery in early April, with the boats assigned to preventive coastal patrol duty covering Vieques, Culebra, Fajardo, Luquillo, and the reserves around Ceiba, and based out of Salinas, Ceiba, and the Piñones stretch of San Juan. “Prevention is key in defending our ecosystem and citizens’ lives,” González Colón said at the announcement. Quiles Pérez thanked the governor’s office for backing the purchase, framing it as giving Rangers officers “the best and most modern equipment.”

The boats themselves are the same Fearless platform Metal Shark has built for the Jamaica Defence Force’s interceptor fleet, at 36 feet with a 10.6-foot beam and an aluminum hull, but rigged differently for this job. Where the JDF boats run Yamaha outboards, the DRNA Rangers boats are powered by triple 300-horsepower Suzuki engines, a detail worth noting rather than assuming every Metal Shark customer standardizes on the same motor brand. Each boat carries 400 gallons of fuel, room for eight officers, and a law-enforcement equipment package: GPS, radar, a satellite system, depth finder, sirens, and lighting. Funding came from two different sources, the Environmental Mitigation Trust Agreement covering one vessel at $609,568 and the State Recreational Boating Safety Program covering the other two at $619,568 apiece.

Metal Shark passed along word, along with a photo, of a delivery to Bomberos Puerto Rico, the island’s firefighting corps, a roughly 38-foot vessel finished in the agency’s red-and-black livery and crewed by what the photo shows as a substantial group of Bomberos personnel and officials at a San Juan-area marina. The vessel in the photo, built for speed with triple outboards and open deck space rather than fixed fire-monitor cannons, reads more like a fast-response and water-rescue platform than a traditional pump-and-monitor fireboat. Whether it fills a marine firefighting role, a rescue and first-response role, or both is a distinction we want from Bomberos Puerto Rico directly. Either way… Check this beast out!

What is well documented is the depth of the relationship behind both deliveries. Metal Shark has been building boats for Puerto Rico’s police since at least 2016, and by the time a pair of 36 Fearless boats went to the Departamento de Policía in March 2024, the company had supplied eight patrol boats to the department over that span. San Juan Police Department has taken its own deliveries on the same platform going back to at least 2018, including a 36 Fearless with a FLIR camera and dive equipment that AAS covered directly in January 2020, at the time described as the fifth patrol boat Metal Shark had delivered to the island in three years. Governor Alejandro García Padilla appeared at an earlier commissioning of three Fearless-class boats for Puerto Rico police in San Juan, putting elected officials on record welcoming this same platform onto the water more than once, across more than one administration.

Seen together, the DRNA and Bomberos additions extend a pattern rather than start a new one: Metal Shark’s Fearless platform, in a handful of configurations and engine choices, has become something close to a standard hull for Puerto Rico’s maritime public-safety agencies, the same way its larger Fearless-based interceptors have for the Jamaica Defence Force’s Coast Guard.

captain has written for ALL AT SEA since 2020.