Mason grew up in Michigan, mahogany speedboat country. When he was around 12 years old he rode in family friend Maynard Smith’s spectacular Hacker 30 Dolphin, which Maynard had owned nearly since new. That simple act of generosity may have changed Mason’s life forever. Looking back now, Mason sees that experience as pivotal. The Hacker 30 was by far the finest, the largest and the most seaworthy stock production runabout built in America. Thirty years later when Mason was in his 40’s he had compiled a file folder containing a list of all the original Hacker 30’s which survived anywhere. One day Mason made a bold move to find the iconic boat of his dreams, which he remembered was in a boathouse on Lake George. Within weeks a deal was struck and then in a matter of hours WILL O’ THE WISP was trailered over and launched into Winnipesaukee where she ran for the next two decades. Mason immediately measured ‘WILLO’ taking the lines and dimensions to study them and virtually memorized them. When Country Western singer Alan Jackson bought WILL O’ THE WISP in 2004, Mason and his wife, left boat-less, could not find a replacement that they liked as well as the venerable Hacker 30. So they chose to build a new one. They named her SULTANA, after an early racing sailboat which Mason’s distant family had owned in 1902. She now runs the length of Lake Winnipesaukee as well as the 1000 Islands and Lake George with regularity and watch-like smoothness.
Because of the overwhelming response to SULTANA everywhere she goes, Mason has built another Hacker 30 Dolphin named WHIRLWIND, which will be made available to a lucky person in the very near future.