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Have you ever felt that
a boat was haunting you? That, for some reason, it kept popping into your
life. Or, in my case, that it somehow kept eluding you.
I’d heard of this
gorgeous wooden boat that cruised past my family’s camp on Saranac
Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. All of our neighbors would
talk about how spectacular she was and how she always paused just in front
of our dock. Few people knew anything about her, just that she belonged
to The Point, a Relais & Châteaux resort that was once the Rockefeller’s
great camp, located not far from our home.
It seemed each time
this boat would cruise past, I happened to be in town, up at the mailbox
or some other place that was just out of site of the lake. I was beginning
to think everyone was pulling my leg about this boat until one day my
mother heard the familiar rumbling (I’d been told you’d hear
her before you’d see her) and called out to me. I made it down to
the dock just in time to see a 33-foot mahogany Hacker Craft come into
view. (At this point I knew little about the Hacker Boat Company aside
from the fact that it had stopped building wooden boats in the late 1950’s.)
With the setting sun and breathtaking mountains as a backdrop, I felt
like I had just stepped into On Golden Pond.
But she was far more
impressive than the little wooden runabout featured in that movie. Her
gleaming wooden hull and deck, impeccable green-leather interior, and
sparkling stainless steel hardware made me wonder who in the world could
have performed a restoration like this.
After a few phone calls,
I found Tim Thuell, general manager of The Point, who would eventually
take me on my first Hacker ride. He explained that the resort had an original
Hacker that was built in 1929, and they’d “get up in the morning
to find it sitting on the bottom of the boat house.” Rather than
continuing to repair the boat they decided to go out and purchase “not
so much a replica as the same boat,” according to David Garrett,
the resort’s owner and president of Relais & Châteaux North
America. That’s when they were pointed in the direction of Bill Morgan.
Morgan has been haunted
by Hacker Crafts for as long as he can remember. As a young boy growing
up in Cleveland, he recalls his father buying an old wooden Chris-Craft.
He took it home and had it for one day before Morgan says he declared,
“‘This is junk.’ And went and bought a Hacker.”
Next page >
Part
2: When it comes down to it, they are created by human hands, from start
to finish. > Page 1, 2,
3, 4, 5
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