co-sponsored by Taylor Buckley and

Build your own boat in a weekend! Bring family and friends for this guided adventure in boatbuilding with the best in the business - Chesapeake Light Craft . Starting Friday morning, you’ll assemble a Chesapeake Light Craft Eastport Pram, an 8-foot rowing/sailing dinghy. This lapstrake Norwegian-style pram is one of the most popular dinghies in the world, with nearly a thousand built. An energetic three days will see you through hull assembly, interior fitting, and much of the epoxy and fiberglass work, ready for completion, paint, and varnish at home. Guided by skilled boatbuilders, this is a unique opportunity to create your own beautiful wooden boat, ready for dinghy duty with a mothership, sail training, or just fishing on the river.

Friday October 26: 8:30am-5:00pm

Saturday, October 27: 8:30am-5:00pm

Sunday, October 28: 9:00am - 3:30pm

You gather beneath a big tent at the Downrigging Weekend Tall Ship & Wooden Boat Festival in Chestertown, Maryland, and you build your own boat in a weekend. You will be assisted at every step by professional boatbuilders, and you get to take your own Eastport Pram home at the end of the weekend, in this case a 16-foot canoe suitable for the whole family.

We have a lot to do! On Friday and Saturday we’ll start between 8am and 9am each day and work until we get to a logical stopping point. On Sunday it’ll be tools-down between 3pm and 4pm.

Yes. $1100 gets you your own boat kit, which you’ll assemble and take home. Not only that, but we’ll pre-assemble some of the parts before the show to get you further along, and provide consumable materials like brushes, spreaders, and so on at no additional charge.

As far as we can. Major construction on your boat will be complete. You will need to finish minor assembly, sanding, and paint or varnish at home, so make sure you have a place to take the boat.

And---very important!!--make sure you have a way to safely transport an 8-foot, 72-pound dinghy on Sunday. Your boat will need to be removed from the festival grounds by the end of the day on Sunday.

Basic tools. Here is a complete list

We will have some tools there for you to borrow, but try to bring as much as you can from that list.

Of course not! Adult families, siblings, or groups of friends are welcome! It IS called Family Boatbuilding, however, so please recall the spirit of the exercise is to bring together groups of people. Solo units are very strongly discouraged. (It is challenging to build a boat solo in three days, even with us helping you!)

Building a boat DOES require an attention span. There are steps in this project suitable for anyone with a modicum of eye-hand coordination. It’s also perfectly okay for the kids to work for a little while, then run off and play to recharge their attention span. Someone in each group should be ready to stick with the project, however, as time will be limited!