HOLDING COURSE

How can you quantify boatbuilding on the Chesapeake Bay? There would be no bay as we know it without the craft: no skipjacks or buy boats, no log canoes or Baltimore clippers, no Trumpy yachts or Whirlwind runabouts. Boatbuilding is as old as human habitation on the bay itself, and despite the vagaries of time, tradition and economic tsunamis, it endures. Whether relying on wood or embracing the most modern materials, Chesapeake boatbuilders create everything from iconic deadrise workboat hulls to new and custom designs, and they continue to thrive.

MATHEWS BROTHERS

Many bay builders trace their design roots to the traditional Chesapeake deadrise workboat. Few have committed to it as deeply, and varied as successfully on its theme, as Mathews Brothers.

The brothers—Pete and Bob—along with Pete’s wife, Annie, as business manager, began building 18-foot Hampton One Designs out of a shop in St. Michaels, Maryland, in the mid-1990s. They soon purchased the molds of bay boatbuilder Clarence Lempke: a 16-foot scow and two deadrise work-boats, 22 and 38 feet. A customer and the brothers brainstormed ways to evolve the 22 from a basic workboat to a pocket-sized cruiser. That’s the Classic Bay Cruiser