Hudson Boat Works

Hudson Boat Works is a manufacturer of Olympic class rowing shells and a world leader in the development of racing hull shapes, carbon composite construction, and innovative components specific to the sport of rowing. Jack Coughlan and his brother-in-law Hugh Hudson founded Hudson Boat Works in 1981, and Jack remains Owner and President today. With a growing international reputation through recent expansion into key international markets, Hudson is looking to double current sales revenue in the next 4 years. To achieve this goal they will need to consolidate and expand their current plant from 20,000 square feet to 37,000 square feet. The number of employees is expected to increase from 50 to 70. Building boats is both an art and science. Industry success requires technical innovation, intuition and risk. Historically, boats and oars were made from wood. The oars were first to be made from composite materials which Jack knew was the direction he had to take with boat construction. Hudson Boat Works was the first rowing boat builder in the world to combine and convert it's fleet to composite construction and aluminum wing rigger technology. Today, this is now the industry standard at the top level of the sport. It was only two short years ago that Hudson released the SHARK Series as their new line of racing shells. Through an ambitious collaboration with a renowned naval architect Britt Chance the new Hudson shells were the first to market using ‘unsteady flow’ computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses. The SHARK hulls are designed to increase stability while maintaining outstanding performance characteristics. In conjunction with the design technology Hudson has worked with composite material suppliers to adapt aerospace technology to create a new proprietary SHARK carbon that has lead to a hull construction that is now 400% more impact resistant and 50% stiffer then the previous Elite construction. Over the past two years Hudson has set a new standard for rowing shell manufacturing. Glen Burston, Technical Operations Manager attributes a big part of the Hudson success to the skills of the manufacturing team. Hudson boats are hand crafted, and require technical skills and strong attention to detail. Hudson boats have won 69 medals at the Olympic and World Rowing Championships since 1984. In the Men's 8 competition at the 2004 Athens Olympics the World Record of 5:19 for the Olympic distance of 2000m, which still stands today, was set in a Hudson. This is quite an accomplishment for a company that started out with two employees in a garage and now has 50 employees and a state of the art plant next door to Lake Fanshawe. Hudson Boat Works has transformed from a small domestic company to one that is competing on the world stage but still proud to say built in London, Ontario.