Build your own adventure
Boatniks build their own Chesapeake Light Crafts with wood, wire and glue in Anne Arundel
It was a mundane task, but one that has stuck with David Cantor from the day he began building his own boat from a kit. “I glued together the first two parts of the hull, stepped back and breathed a sigh of relief,” said Cantor, 69, of Edgewater. That was months ago. Now the vessel, a 17-foot sailboat produced by Chesapeake Light Craft, of Annapolis, is nearly ready to roll out of his garage and onto South River. There, the Northeaster Dory is sure to turn heads — and not just because it’s painted fire-engine red.
“The design of this boat is faithful to 200-year-old traditions,” said Cantor, a retired pharmaceutical research manager who can’t wait to show it off.
“Besides,” he said, “my wife wants her garage back.”
Dreamboat
At Chesapeake Light Craft, the emails pour in from folks who’ve built boats from kits created by the 26-yearold company. “I’ve never started and finished anything so meaningful in my life,” reads one. “My dad and I hadn’t done anything together before, reads another.”
Amateur do-it-yourselfers are the target, said John Harris, managing director of CLC, which has shipped more than 40,000 assembly packets of sailboats, kayaks, canoes, rowboats and paddle boards to customers in 70 countries and on every continent but Antarctica.
“We received one photo of an 18-foot sailboat being lowered from a 10th-floor apartment in Seoul, South Korea,” said Harris.
Kits include all of the essentials: marine-grade plywood shaped by a robotic cutting machine, copper wire (for fastening), fiberglass and enough epoxy to float a battleship. Plus an instruction manual that any bungler could follow.
“We focus on the first-timer,” said Harris, 49, of Kent Island. “Building stuff is cool, especially a boat which combines sculpture, engineering and material science. We strive to make the project accessible and enjoyable. Got patience? You can do this.”
Moreover, for a fee, CLC offers weeklong classes to walk clients through basic construction at its workshop in Annapolis. Kits themselves range from nearly $1,000 for paddle boards to $8,000 for a 15-foot cruising sailboat (with cabin). Most boats sell for about $2,000 and take about 80 hours to finish.
While the CLC catalog lists 115 designs, there’s room for more, said Harris:
“We’re working on a replica of a 25-foot Viking boat, excavated in the 1990s, that was dated to 1140. It would be great for re-enactments.”
Labor of love
Scram. That’s Abbie Rooper’s response to those offering to help her build the 16-foot wooden kayak in her garage in Arnold.
“This is my baby, and I want it to be all my labor,” said Rooper, 34. Hers alone, the craft will be, come hell or high water.
Assembled from a CLC kit purchased last November, the sea kayak should be afloat this fall after more than 100 hours of work, said the owner, a veteran kayaker who is employed as an aerospace engineer.
“I spend a lot of time in male-dominated arenas, so being able to accomplish this myself is a ‘prove yourself ’ kind of thing,” she said. “I’ve definitely had people who, when they see it, assume that it’s not my boat.”
Yet there she is stands, for hours, stitching and sanding and gluing together the kayak of her dreams.
“I haven’t made any egregious errors,” she said. “I do use too much epoxy; from all of the drips, you can see outline of the kayak on the garage floor [like a chalk figure at a crime scene]. But at least I know it’s watertight.”
And all hers. Throughout the process, she said, “when I need an extra set of hands, my husband helps me hold things in place; otherwise, he’s forbidden to touch it.”
Ben Rooper, who has built several kayaks himself, said his wife has done “an amazing job” and that folks “ooh and aah” when they see the vessel.
And though the couple is moving to Catonsville, they’ll continue to explore the Severn River, from which they’ve watched the Annapolis fireworks on the Fourth of July. Years ago, her husband proposed marriage while they were skimming over the water in Middle River.
“It was midmorning and the water was like glass, the smoothest I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It was so calm that you could barely tell where the water ended and the sky began. Ben paddled up to me and said he wanted to spend the rest of his life having mornings like this.”
They now have a 9-year-old, for whom mom plans to build a craft of her own.
“Kayaks are my happy place,” Abbie Rooper said. “When I finish this, I know it’ll be fulfilling to paddle something that I’ve built myself.”
Beaming with pride
Kevin Littell figures he spent 80 hours building his rowboat. Truth be told, it was less.
“I probably spent 10 hours just staring at it and thinking, ‘Wow, this is really cool. I can’t believe I’m putting this thing together,’ “he said.
The boat, an 18-foot Annapolis Wherry, sits at the dock at Littell’s home on the Magothy River, in Arnold. It has aged gracefully in the eight years since the software sales executive assembled it from a CLC kit for about $3,000, roughly half the price of a store-bought rowboat. One-third of the cost covered a one-week class for mostly novice builders at CLC’s workshop.
“It’s not about saving money,” said Littell, 55. “It’s about the experience of building a boat and turning a pile of plywood into something so beautiful and functional.”
In the end, he spurned the family’s 42-foot racing sailboat in favor of the homemade skiff with the sliding seat.
“It’s a simpler, more efficient boat than what we had,” he said. “Now, I can get away from my desk [at home] for an hour and go rowing without a lot of planning. Its weight [65 pounds] makes it easy to put on the car; I drove it to Washington last spring to see the cherry blossoms from out on the Potomac River.”
Too often, with do-it-yourself projects, Littell said, “you do a lot of navel gazing. But the kit is so well engineered, it’s almost disappointing how easy the assembly was. All of the pieces are labeled; all of the holes line up. Building it was like taking a vacation.”
Not that the simplicity bruised his ego.
“When people say, ‘I love your boat,’ I say, ‘Thanks —
“It’s not about saving money. It’s about the experience of building a boat and turning a pile of plywood into something so beautiful and functional.”
I built it.’ “
Homemade
Not until he retired did Jay Taylor discover his penchant for slapping boats together. At 73, he has assembled four wooden crafts from Chesapeake Light Craft in the spacious garage of his home in a waterfront community in Severna Park.
“It’s a hands-on skill that I knew was in me somewhere,” said Taylor, a retired U.S. Foreign Service employee. “Though I had a white-collar career, I like doing manual tasks. Every time I touch a tool, I make a faux pas, but when you work with wood, everything is reversible. Screw it up and you can fix it.”
There’s a 14-foot Peeler Skiff in his driveway and a 7-foot kayak at the dock several blocks away on the Severn River. Taylor also
— Kevin Littell
built a Northeaster Dory (a rowboat/sailboat) for a friend in Maine, and a dinghy for his cardiologist
at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The Peeler Skiff, named for its crabbing lore, cost Taylor $2,500.
“I’ve seen those built by pros that cost $16,000,” he said. “They are drop-dead gorgeous. My boat has beauty that only a mother could love — but it’s the same boat.”
The kits, he said, are reminiscent of “those of a model airplane. It’s a little like paint-by-numbers, but it’s always fascinating to see a stack of wood start to resemble a boat.”