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https://www.barrons.com/articles/dream-boats-wooden-speedboats-cruise-again-01663256986

Pull up to a dock in a mahogany speedboat, burnished like a Stradivarius under layer upon layer of varnish, classic engine rumbling like far-off thunder, and you are connecting with a potent brand of refined retro cool. Picture George Clooney skimming over Lake Como in a gleaming antique Riva, say, or JFK in his Century runabout Restofus, or Frank and Dino and Sammy racing across Lake Tahoe in arguably the most famous wooden speedboat of all, the 55-foot

“A mahogany speedboat takes you to a different time,” says Mike Turcotte, vice president of his family’s venerable Gar Wood Custom Boats. “These are elegant, high-end boats built in the traditional manner, with mahogany from the keel up and book-matched wood grain from starboard to port.” 

There is a thriving resale market for these handsome “runabouts” from bygone days, some now over a century old. (Minnesota broker Mahogany Bay, for instance, has a 25-foot, 1915 Speedway currently on offer for $25,000.) What may be more surprising to nonaficionados is that gorgeous, painstakingly handcrafted mahogany speedboats are still being launched, now with an extra cherry on top. The new models being crafted by luxury builders like Hacker-Craft, Gar Wood, Grand Craft, Van Dam, StanCraft, and Streblow retain their classic chic without many of the burdensome maintenance issues that go along with the heritage boats. 

The largest of the midcentury icons of wooden speedboating, Chris-Craft in the U.S. and Riva in Italy, have passed out of the hands of their founding families and switched from wood hulls to fiberglass. (Though the old Rivas remain a kind of gold standard. “Those are the guys with sweaters over their shoulders and girlfriends that are better looking than they are,” jokes Matt Smith, publisher of woodyboater.com.) The legacy companies that remain are nearly all family-scale operations, some dedicated to producing only one or two boats a year. 

“I wanted to find a company that fired me up,” explains Patrick Gallagher, a wooden boat lover from Wisconsin who recently found himself casting about for a midlife career change. On an impulse, he cold-called the owner of Grand Craft, one of America’s best-known luxury builders. A few months later, in 2020, Gallagher had bought the company, and found himself with a lot of work on his hands. “They had gotten the wind knocked out of them in the recession of 2008 and never really recovered production levels,” he says. “Whether it was craftsmen retiring or whatever, the business had shrunk. We had to reinflate the balloon.” 

“Reinflation” in Gallagher’s terms meant gradually ramping production up to maybe 15 boats a year from one or two. But that is a deceptively modest sounding goal: Constructing a boat like the Burnham, Grand Craft’s 26-foot flagship model, can absorb 5,000 man hours of labor. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Gallagher moved Grand Craft from Michigan to his home base in Lake Geneva, Wis., and set about rethinking the process, with a contemporary workplace, old-school craftspeople, and a bracing dose of modern tech. 

Among other things, “Every single piece of wood that builds our boats is now modeled with computer-assisted design software, ” Gallagher says. “We give that to our mahogany supplier and the pieces are then laser cut. We are marrying our finish carpentry to technology and what that translates to is that our boats are better engineered now than ever before.” 

And Grand Craft’s boats, like those of its luxury competitors, are also drier, sturdier, and easier to take care of than the boats of the past. Hulls on older wooden boats, for instance, demand presoaking after being out of the water for a period of time to swell their planking tighter. And many will still take on water and suffer wood rot. 

The new mahogany runabouts employ techniques like multilayered planking systems and inner boards coated in epoxies to eliminate contact between wood surface and water. The new boats are high-touch, heirloom-quality craft, like the older boats, only watertight. “Our boats carry a lifetime warranty against wood rot and water intrusion,” says Jeremy Pearson, worldwide sales manager for one-off custom builder Van Dam, based in Boyne City, Mich. “We expect them to outlast us all.”

Advocates claim that the mahogany boats being produced today require no more TLC than their fiberglass counterparts, and note that wooden boats can be fitted with any option you can

install on a fiberglass model, from bow-thrusters to GPS to underwater lights. Though, to be sure, many builders take pains not to let modern amenities spoil the vintage aesthetic. 

“We do make an effort to conceal that,” says Turcotte of Gar Wood. “We replicate everything from the original instrument clusters and gauges to the upholstery. When that boat pulls up to the dock, it looks like 1937.” 

The wooden boats also, famously, ride like 1937, a boating experience devotees believe is as endangered as the giant panda. “It is night and day,” explains Erin Badcock, chief operating officer of her family’s Queensbury, N.Y.-based Hacker-Craft, the oldest of the legacy builders. “Our classic runabout is designed as a displacement hull, so it really slices through the water. You aren’t riding bow-up on the tops of waves to get on a plane, with that slapping motion you get with some fiberglass boats. It’s just a smoother ride overall; you feel like you are gliding.” 

“They are fast as hell,” Gallagher says. “Apples to apples, a wooden boat is lighter than fiberglass, and any engine you can put in a fiberglass boat you can put in one of ours.” 

The thrill of wind blowing through your hair hearkens back to these speedboats’ origins, when John Hacker ruled the race competitions of 1911 with Kitty Hawk, whose sleek lines were interrupted by six vertical exhaust pipes, angled like rocket launchers. Or Garfield Wood’s 1917-1921 Gold Cup winners, eventually targeted by the Cup’s rules committee, who made it clear that they preferred “gentlemen’s runabouts” to Wood’s aircraft-engine equipped torpedoes. Even without aircraft engines, the new-build boats clip right along, too. Stan Craft’s signature Rivelle model, for instance, equipped with its standard twin 430-horsepower Ilmor engines, hits 65 miles per hour. 

Whether throttled up, or bobbing at anchor in a sun-spangled sea with say, Rita Hayworth sunning herself on the foredeck while the Aga Khan lounges about in the cockpit, mahogany speedboats capture more than just the eye, they encompass a whole catalog of aspirations and associations. “When you’re out on the water in one of these boats, there’s just a feeling to it that, well, I don’t even know a word for that feeling,” Smith says. “It’s a spiritual experience.” 

This article appears in the September 2022 issue of Penta magazine.

Pull up to a dock in a mahogany speedboat, burnished like a Stradivarius under layer upon layer of varnish, classic engine rumbling like far-off thunder, and you are connecting with a potent brand of refined retro cool.

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