The Eastport Pram: a lovely little pram whose kit makes an ideal first building project, thanks to the "Lapstitch™" patented system. A standing lug rig turns the tender into a small sailing dinghy for teaching your young sailors or messing about when the large boat is lying at anchor.

Length: 2.36 m, beam: 1.22 m, weight: 27 kg. Sail area: 3.63 m2.

The Eastport Pram is available as a building kit or ready to row/sail. The kit contains everything needed to build the pram. You add just the paint and varnish. Building this kit is easy, all you'll need is a bit (a lot!) of patience and neatness to build this lovely "stitch and glue" hull.

At last a building kit for a tender featuring solid stability, good performance under oar, a practical sailing rig and lovely lines. The Eastport Pram's deep rocker helps to minimize wetted surface and to keep the transoms from dragging. The result is a small boat that is as satisfying to row as possible in such a short waterline. Just like our Arwen, two rowing positions let you distribute the load to keep the hull flat on the water to optimize comfort and performance.

The standing lug rig with a 3,63 sqm sail area transforms the tender into a small sailing dinghy for trainees or to go places. Read the excerpt from the review published in "Good Old Boat".

The sail area and the efficiency of the daggerboard and rudder make the Pram a sharp sailer which won't pale against local Optimist dinghies! By the way, it's not by chance that her sail area is the same as theirs. Permanent flotation tanks are built under the forward and aft seat to provide safety just in case.

To withstand bad treatment, planking is made of 6 mm okoume marine plywood, and 9 mm for all other hull parts (transoms, seats, bulwarks, etc.) The sole and garboards are coated with a fiberglass/epoxy stratification inside and out, so that the Eastport Pram won't fear boot or rock (with moderation!)

The Eastport Pram kit is the ideal kit for a first boatbuilding project.

The kit parts are cut according to the patented "LapStitch™" building system: the planking is "rabbeted" or grooved on one edge, which ensures that it is stitched precisely according to the designed shape. Stitching is done with copper wire, then planks are glued with epoxy and the stitches are removed.

All plywood parts are cut to the millimeter on a CNC machine. Like all other Chesapeake Light Craft™ kits, this kit contains everything needed to build the Eastport Pram as you see it on the pictures, except for the paint and varnish... and your work, your patience, your skill (ok I stop...) You'll need a place large enough (a garage is perfect, once you kick the car out) and punctually a second pair of hands to help you turn the hull.

You'll have to finish a few easy cuts, round some edges, but most of the work will be to drill plenty of small holes, insert wire stitches, tighten these, mix several kilos of epoxy, apply it as well as some fiberglass cloth, then take out those stitches and sand, sand again and sand some more....

In addition to the wood parts, the kit includes the plans (with measures in feet and inches), a construction manual in English, plus a translated version in French with metric conversions. You'll also find the fiberglass cloth and the epoxy kit (resin, slow and regular hardener, thickener for joints). The kit also includes all required hardware, one set of brass/bronze oarlock sockets and one pair of brass/bronze oarlocks.

The optional sailing kit contains the spar blanks, the sail, the rudder parts as well as the daggerboard and all sailing hardware.

See the pricelist

The sailing kit transforms the pram into a small sailing dinghy. This transformation can be done at building time or later on. The sailing kit box is 2.45 m long, 0.55 m wide and 0.10 m thick.