(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
Hacker-Craft, the high-end, classic wooden boat built in Queensbury with a standard combustion inboard engine, now has an electric model. Family-owned Castaway Marina on Warner Bay in Lake George will celebrate 25 years in business this April. Morgan Marine, the former home of Hacker-Craft, now sells five lines of boats when they used to sell just the one. And two locations on Lake George — Freedom Boat Club in Dunham’s Bay and Morgan Marine north of Sabbath Day Point — will have charging stations for electric boats that will take a 2,000 pound battery from empty to full charge in about an hour.
This was the news from a handful of dealers at the Great Upstate Boat Show at The Dome sports complex in Queensbury Friday morning March 31. The show opened with a ribbon cutting for the 15th annual “Summer starts here" event.
“It’s the best I’ve seen in 15 years,” said Joel Holden, with the Eastern New York Marine Trades Association, the group that coordinates the show. He said he was happy to be back at the show after a three-year hiatus and to see every configuration of power boat from fishing and pontoon boats to runabouts and cabin cruisers.
"You name it, we got it,” he said. “But no sailboats.”
[Read about the three-year hiatus here.]
“We have an all-electric boat here, so that’s a nice new edition to the show,” Holden said.
Captain Todd Sims says the electric boat company Ingenity has two businesses that operate out of Tennessee and Florida. One designs and builds their own boats and the other works with other boating companies. Sims is the director of sales in the Americas for Ingenity.
“We do the computer-aided-design, the center of gravity and the fluid dynamics testing, and all that stuff, and then we know where the system is going to be installed" in various boats, he said.
“The batteries are so heavy — there’s 2,000 pounds of batteries in this boat [the Ingenity EL series] and the Hacker. You have to put them in the correct spot so that the boat sits properly in the water, otherwise, you’re not going to get the performance out of it,” Sims said.
He said he highlights the convenience of an electric boat when he talks about the Ingenity line. They can be plugged in at any dock that has power, and winterization is easier than a standard stern drive combustion engine.
The EL series has the deck configuration of a pontoon boat but the hull is a fiber-glas tri-hull. It was a design decision that gives the boat the space for the batteries below the deck and more buoyancy than pontoons, Sims said.
The Hacker-Craft can get about 1 hour of run time at full throttle and 2.5-3 hours of run time at cruising speed, Sims said. One electric-drive Hacker-Craft has been produced so far — and it is under contract — with more on the way.
Thalia Chase of Castaway said Mastercraft has a new surf star system with surf tabs and actuators used in wake boarding, wake surfing and other behind-the-boat fun.
Their other line is Regal with available Yamaha outboard models. She admitted that Lake George is much more of a inboard-outboard lake, but Regal does more business with outboards, she said.
Bob Palandrani said his sales floor at Snug Harbor Marina has about 30 new boats ready to move. Most are the Bennington pontoon boats, but about eight are the v-hull Stingrays. He said the supply chain issues are still affecting the boating industry.
He is expecting a great weekend since friends who sell Benningtons and have been to other boat shows have reported great numbers to him.
The trade association’s Holson thanked Normandin marketing and M&M digital printing for the work necessary to make the show happen. The Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Capital Region Chamber of Commerce hosted the show.