Launched ‘Classic Boats’; builds luxury wooden boats in Hudson Falls

By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer

In April Classic Boats set up shop in a 15,000 square foot warehouse at 5 Depot Street in Hudson Falls making one-of-a-kind wooden boats whose prices can range from $250,000 to $5-million.

“We have a proposal out right now for a very special type of boat,” founder-owner Adam Porter told The Chronicle. “It’s a three-year build, 11,000 hours of labor.

“We’re really concentrating on the one-off, highly luxury one-of-a-kind type of boats. We want to let people know that we’re here to build like any one-off boat that they can imagine. We have naval architects, so you could sit down with our naval architect and put together a boat. “We understand the task at hand and the opportunity, that we don’t take lightly, to build boats for clients like this.

“We understand that if we get these boats out and keep these types of clients happy, it’s going to be a word of mouth type of thing.”

“In any given year in the United States, there might be 20 to 30 new wooden boats produced,” Mr. Porter said. “They’re like an expensive watch, but you get to enjoy it a little bit more than a nice watch.

“It’s a particular lifestyle and image that you’re trying to achieve. People can look at them as assets because there’s just not many people in the world that build these.”

Mr. Porter said he ran the sales department for Hacker Boat Company in Queensbury for three years. He and his business partners all previously worked for Hacker, the classic wood boat maker.

“I worked at marinas on Lake George as a kid,” said Mr. Porter, a Ticonderoga native who now lives in Queensbury.

“I always enjoyed boats. I had a mobile boat rental company back in the day, and then once I got into Hacker and understood the classic boat world, that’s what kind of drew me to this.”

He decided to break out on his own. “Just like any entrepreneur, you just felt like you could do things better, represent the client better,” he explained.

His initial partner was Denis Suka in Norway who had started a popular Instagram page with the handle classicboats.

“I saw Denis as such an opportunity to get in front of the world with this type of stuff, so as soon as I left Hacker I partnered with Denis,” Mr. Porter said.

“We basically took the classicboats social media page and put a brick and mortar behind it,” Mr. Porter said.

They started sourcing and selling boats in 2022, but Mr. Porter says that before long “I had clients kind of challenge me, saying, hey do you think you could start your own shop?”

So he did, opening at a farm in Argyle in late 2023, moving to the former Hacker facility in Ticonderoga in 2024 before moving to Hudson Falls this spring.

He said the boat building, storing, maintenance and brokering company has clients as far-flung as Dubai, Italy, and Germany and uses genuine mahogany sourced from Africa on two builds.

Mr. Porter calls this area “one of the wooden boat meccas of the world.”

He said he moved the company from Ticonderoga to Hudson Falls because “there were still some craftsmen left from the old Hacker regime that were still in Ticonderoga, but in order for me to build a real team to produce more, I had to come south where there was more talent.

“I was looking for a vacant building that gave me the ample space to house what I had in my building. This one fit the bill.

Mr. Porter said wooden boats “ride like a sportscar. They cut through the water differently than a fiberglass.

“Most fiberglass brands are made to be wider to get more people in. And flatter bottoms, so they smack, they ride up higher. So it’s a completely different feel in a wooden boat.”

He says of making wooden boats, “It’s an art, at the end of the day. You literally assemble the boat and take it back apart, then put glue and epoxy on it, and then put it together. So there’s multiple steps to it.”

Mr. Porter says, “It’s a niche market. So a lot of the guys that wanted wooden boats, have them. It’s not like there’s a ton of guys in line for wooden boats.

How’s business? “It’s slower than, say, 2018,” he said. “They’re still out there, but what we’re finding is like an ultra-niche type of buyer that wants a one-off. They’re not looking for a production boat or even like the used boats.”

While “a lot of these guys aren’t affected by the economy,” Mr. Porter said “some are.” Compared to 2018, “the economy was just in better shape at that point, and I think people had more disposable income, and they were investing in luxury assets like these, whereas in the last four years it’s kind of been unknown.”

He said clients mostly find out about the company on Instagram, where the classicboats page has 297,000 followers.

Asked his goals, Mr. Porter gestured toward his business partners on the floor.

“The goal is to give these guys a healthy sustainable workload, continue to work with high-end clients, and get the opportunity to put out one-of-a-kind boats that set us apart in the industry.”

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