CLAYTON, N.Y. -- "An aluminum boat is about half the weight of a fiberglass boat, when people think metal they think, 'wow!' Really, really quite heavy but that's not exactly the way it is and by the fact that they are lighter, they use less fuel, they go through the water generally a little bit easier and that makes the whole operating, the pressure on the operating budget quite a bit less,” said Brian Leishman with Metalcraft Marine.

“We're just finishing a project for a company called Dragon Oil, which has a head office in Dubai, part of the Arab Emirates. However the boat will actually go to Turkmenistan and operate as a support vessel for a drilling platform, oil platform in the Caspian Sea. It will function as a tender, a diving tender for an oil platform, so when they need repairs and maintenance on the platform, they have to put divers in the water. To do that and they have to get the divers to their work station as quickly and safely as possible and that's why we designed this boat specifically for that purpose,” Leishman said.

The facility in Clayton has built boats for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, for the New York City Ferry Service, and the U.S. Navy. They're in the process of building a boat for the Newburgh Volunteer Fire Department. They’re also now producing a fishing research boat for the Quebec government while another project will be for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada.

"Our goal is to double the business every year for the next three years, if that's possible, and in fact it looks like it's happening faster than that. So we started with seven employees, we'll soon go to nine, by the end of 2008 we should be at thirteen and by the end of 2009 we hope to be at twenty. So we're more than doubling our staff and perhaps maybe tripling it in twenty four months,” Leishman said. “That's what we're here for. We want to make boats but we also need to employ people, we want to stay local, we want to hire people from this community and that will be good for everybody."

The company hopes to produce a new work boat utilizing a hybrid diesel engine and solar panels to charge the electric systems.