The 40th edition of the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, MD, is now in the books. Many of last year’s early arrivals witnessed a caravan of 19 cement trucks to pour the foundation for the museum’s new Welcome Center, followed by a soggy, rainy weekend. This year the construction fencing is gone and a brand new building occupies the space. And the weather, while not perfect, cooperated to produce a nice fall weekend.
A regular feature of the MASCF, when a hurricane doesn’t threaten, is a Thursday afternoon gunkhole trip down the Miles River to overnight on Wye Island. This year one group of sailors got a head start on the festival, taking advantage of the beautiful early October weather, and headed across the Miles River on Wednesday to raft up on Leeds Creek. And while the “wrung what you brung” Saturday afternoon sailboat races in the recent past have been “sail out the start, drift back to the finish,” this year there was plenty of wind, and more than enough to cross the finish line—as long as you didn’t capsize.
Close to 100 boats were listed on this year’s program, many parked on the lawn, the rest in slips or moored to the floats. Among a wide assortment of kayaks, canoes, dinghies, and small homebuilts, I counted more than a dozen catboats of various sizes, and I’m sure I missed a couple.
Walking around among the boats, I was drawn to a beautiful, bright-finished cedar strip dinghy designed by John Clark. And some really neat leatherwork on the gunwales of a Nutshell Pram.
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