Empress was built in New York in 1992, a Hacker-Craft in the tradition the company has been building since 1908. She is just over thirty feet, powered by a 454 XL Crusader, and she carries more than a century of wooden boat craftsmanship in her lines.
She came under our care in 2021, acquired from a private collector in California, and now runs on her home water of Whitefish Lake, Montana.
In 2022 she was restored completely by the team at Coeur Custom in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, over a thousand hours of work. She was given fresh mahogany and a few careful modern touches: a cocktail table that stows in the hull, a bow thruster for close-quarters docking, and warm lighting throughout.
Her name comes from a summer tradition, the Empress 1908 gin and tonic. Pour the tonic and the gin shifts from deep indigo to a clear glacier blue, the same turn the lake makes from mountain dusk to open water. The same model of boat appears in Netflix's The Crown.
Empress is built for the good hours on the water. Picnics aboard, Wellfleet oysters, a cold glass of champagne as the light goes. She is American lake life at its finest, and there is nothing else like her on Whitefish.
