Hacker-Craft: Profile of an American Boatbuilder

Lake Effect

To really understand Hacker-Craft’s beautiful boats, you have to start at the beginning.

When it comes to boats, I’ve always felt that certain brands and styles evoke very specific waters; they’re almost synonymous with one another. I look at a well-found trawler and see myself counting off markers on the Intracoastal Waterway. A vintage sailing catboat brings to mind Narragansett Bay, in the same way a working Skipjack, hauling crab pots, is rooted on the Chesapeake. Your pretty Hinckley Picnic Boat paints a vivid portrait of Maine’s Southwest Harbor. And a gleaming, varnished mahogany motorboat, to me, should be cleaving across a glittering lake ringed by woods and mountains, like Lake George in upstate New York, deep in the Adirondacks.

This was, lucky for me, precisely where I found myself late last summer, about to take a test drive on a 26-foot Hacker-Craft runabout. Built in 2019, Miss Stacey II was a work of nautical art whose very DNA is part and parcel of this lake and shoreline.

These days, Hacker-Craft are built in an industrial area in Queensbury, New York, near Lake George’s southern shores. Thirty-odd miles north, on the lake’s opposite coast, Miss Stacey II was docked in a boathouse and marina on Silver Bay at Morgan Marine’s Base in Bolton’s Landing. This is Hacker-Craft’s second home, where the boats were built from the late 1970s until 2008. It was here that the company’s COO, Erin Badcock, welcomed me aboard, kicked over the Ilmor 5.7L, 365-horsepower inboard, and idled into the lake.

It was a glorious chamber-of-commerce sort of afternoon, all the better as tourist season was winding down and the waters were uncluttered. And Badcock was a smooth and seasoned operator, having grown up in an avid boating family that summered here throughout her childhood. As Badcock opened up the throttle, Miss Stacey II settled on plane, notching speeds in the mid-30-knot range at 5,000 rpm and carving turns as if on rails. Which is when Badcock turned the helm over to me.

I’ll admit that driving this sort of classic woody was a new experience for me, but so was touring the Queensbury plant earlier that day with Badcock and in-house naval architect Jeffrey Brown. And I have to admit, I was just as intrigued by Hacker-Craft’s rich history as I was with the busy proceedings on the shop floor.

The original, eponymous Hacker Boat Co. was launched in 1908 by visionary naval architect and marine engineer John L. Hacker. He was known not only for his prodigious career building runabouts, racers, commuters and tenders, and even inventing the V-shaped hull design, but also for the floating biplane he conceived for the Wright brothers. A close friend of well-heeled customers like Henry Ford, for many years Hacker’s boats were some of the world’s fastest, including Kitty Hawk, which in 1911 was the first craft to top the then-unthinkable speed of 50 knots. By the Roaring Twenties, Hacker’s speedboats were status symbols for captains of industry, Hollywood celebrities and far-flung royals, so much so that they earned the soliloquy “The Steinway of Runabouts.”

The Great Depression threw a serious wrench into the pleasure-boat market, and while Hacker continued to design and build winning raceboats and record-setting speedsters for several decades, it wasn’t until William Morgan took control of the company and moved operations to his home state of New York that it once again began to flourish at its earlier levels of scale and prestige. After originally setting up shop on Silver Bay, in 2004 he sold the company to Robert Wagemann. It changed hands again in 2011, when majority investor George Badcock—Erin’s dad, and an aficionado of wooden boats—took control of the business and moved the building facilities to Ticonderoga, New York. Finally, in 2021, the Badcock’s made the move to the current 15,000 square-foot plant in Queensbury (with another adjacent 9,000 square-foot building for staging and storage), a more centralized and efficient site.

A graduate of Fordham University with a degree in political science, Erin Badcock has a unique background for a boatbuilder, but she was pressed into service when her father acquired Hacker-Craft. “I said I’d work for him for a year,” she laughed, with now over a decade in the business behind her. “He was still involved in his own (vehicle leasing) business and wanted someone on the ground from an eyes and ears perspective.”

It’s clear, however, that she shares her father’s vision for the company. “He always had wood boats and loved the brand, and wanted to see it continue and improve,” she said. “I’m not sure anyone else was necessarily going to step up with that passion or willingness to make the investment. When we acquired the company in full, we decided we needed to address the quality standards in the builds and implement that into the culture. It was a big upheaval of trying to right a ship that deserved the accolades that would measure up to its legacy.”

Perhaps no two people better personify the transition between the Morgan and Badcock ownership eras than the engineer, Jeff Brown, and old-school boatbuilder Tim Gautreau, whose 33-year career with the company spanned the bridge between the two regimes. Brown was a local boat-crazed Lake George kid who pursued his passion at the Landing School in Maine before earning his degree in yacht and power craft design at Solent University in Southampton, England. He followed that with a stint at the cutting-edge Gunboat catamaran company before settling in at Hacker-Craft, where he’s been now for over a decade.

Gautreau was a seat-of-the-pants craftsman when Brown, who was initially working to ensure the boats were meeting U.S. Coast Guard standards and addressing overall quality control, came aboard. “If Tim needed to do a custom layout or something, he drew and lofted in full scale,” said Brown. “With an engine layout, if terms of where he was going to lay the keel, he’d draw it on a cinder-block wall and the blocks would give him some datum points with the plan view right on the wall.” But Gautreau was also curious about the technical advantages and benefits of contemporary yacht-design tools like the CAD software and 3D modeling employed by his new, young protégé.

“He was one of the hardest workers you’ll ever know,” said Brown of Gautreau, with whom he worked for about seven years before he retired in 2015. “A lot of people said, ‘Well, this is how we’ve done it for 15 years.’ Tim was on the other side of things. He loved and lived the boats. And if we could make them better, and he could learn some new things in the process, it was great.” When the ownership changed, so too did the dynamic on the floor. It was a generational passing of the torch.

These days, Brown draws a fair amount of custom designs, which account for roughly 30-percent of the company’s new builds. And while I identify the brand as a lake boat, Badcock said the split between fresh- and salt-water owners is about 70/30, with a growing number of boats going to Florida and California, and even a dealer in Thailand. And it’s worth noting that the ownership demographic is also changing, and skewing towards younger customers looking for a family boat, not a cocktail cruiser. There are two established Hacker-Craft lines (though almost all are customized to some degree): the Legacy collection is the traditional series and includes the Sport, Runabout and Racer models, while the Aquavant is a more recent addition to the brand and features the Center Console, Commuter and new Electric Series.

The Electric Series opens a forward-thinking chapter for this very established outfit. “It’s a step toward the future of the brand without getting away from the legacy, design and performance of the boat,” said Badcock. “Our interest in the European market also led to the decision to go in that direction.” The first electric one, a 27-foot Sport, has been delivered to its new owner on Lake Tahoe, and the second model in the line was well underway on the factory floor. In a somewhat novel arrangement, Hacker has partnered with Ingenity Electric, a subsidiary of Florida-based Correct Craft, for their propulsion systems. Correct Craft has been installing Ingenity systems in their Nautique boats for several years now, but Hacker is the first company not under their umbrella to use them. “It’s been an incredibly supportive partnership,” said Badcock.

And, of course, Hacker-Craft does a bustling trade in restorations, a huge part of the business, as existing owners are constantly looking to upgrade or spiff up their ride. A stroll around the floor with Brown to check out some of their current projects offered a glimpse into the breadth and variety of their models.

There was a sweet little 22-foot Runabout with a rear-engine layout, “which was developed here in New York,” said Brown. “Originally this would’ve been a mid-engine boat but with the engine in the back you can have both cockpits forward, with wraparound seats in the second cockpit. And check out the original Model-T steering wheel, not too many boats with one of those these days.”

We swung over to a nearby 30-footer, and Brown pointed out the split navigation sidelights and noted that this was another vessel from the Morgan days. “When Bill first started building these boats, he was building replicas you could take to an antique boat show, with single-plank sides and a double-planked bottom that swelled up. And he pretty quickly figured out there wasn’t much desire to have a historically accurate boat if it took three days to swell up to float. So one of his first steps, in the early 1980s, was to switch to triple-planked epoxy bottoms with West System epoxy. They got on board with West very early.”

There was a 28-footer apparently in the midst of a major overhaul. “Lots of cool little details here,” said Brown. “The owner’s calling this his ‘Resto Mod’ modification. There used to be another cockpit forward that we decked over and he’s repowering it with a Ferrari V-12 engine he’s getting marinized out in Arizona. We have a lot of car enthusiasts as customers. If you’re a motorhead, you can be one across the two different avenues, autos and boats.”

Lastly, we came across a shocking sight, a boat undergoing a near complete rebuild, after having been creamed at a dock on Lake Winnipesaukee by a 50-foot Sea Ray earlier in the summer. “It’s our Hacker-Craft 30-footer, and there’s a huge number of them out there,” Brown said. “The easiest thing would’ve been to find a boat of similar age and in good shape, put his name on it, and send it out the door. But this is a boat he’s had for many years, and he wanted his boat back. It’s been interesting dealing with the insurance companies, but we’re going to get him his boat.”

Back on the lake, it was impossible not to enjoy the expectant feeling of sliding behind the varnished wheel of Miss Stacey II. From the sharp little windshield, to the sumptuous leather bench seat, to the neat retro instrument panel, to the stick shift on the floor, it seemed like experiencing time travel, returning to a bygone era of class and elegance. I was already pretty mesmerized before throttling up with a spin of the little knob on the dashboard, and then I was long gone.

There was a slight chop on the sparkly waters in the late-season norther, which Miss Stacey II shouldered through with ease. I was a bit more conservative than Badcock with the RPMs, but when I had her on plane at 30 knots there wasn’t another sunny place on the planet I’d have rather been.

How to summarize it all? Well, when I was a relative youngster, decades ago, I owned an old MGB convertible, and suddenly I was right back in the day. One hand on the wheel, tight and responsive as could be; wind in the hair; elbow hanging over the side. As I was driving along, Badcock offered to snap my photo, and I politely declined, which in hindsight was a huge mistake. Because, without question, I’m never again going to look any cooler.

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This article originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/boats/hacker-craft-profile-of-an-american-boatbuilder