Who We Are

Chase Small Craft has a singular vision: Helping people build & launch the most beautiful small boats in the world.

Our work to accomplish this mission takes many forms including:

Offering boat kits with all the parts ready to be assembled at your home or workshop.
Building custom boats for clients who want to get on the water without having built the boat themselves.
Teaching workshops and classes to help individuals improve their boat building skills.

At Chase Small Craft, we are always looking to improve our skills, knowledge, customer support, and processes. We call this "sneaking up on perfection".

Recently, we have adopted the tagline ‘boat kits for explorers.’ This sums up our goal of helping individuals to get out on the water and explore this big, beautiful world of ours. Whether it’s sailing the coast of Maine as the fog bank masks the islands off in the distance, rowing through the crystal clear waters of a lake at sunrise, or motoring with your kids out to your favorite fishing spot, we want you to be able to get out, explore, and experience the unique natural perspectives that only a boat can offer.

Thanks for visiting the Chase Small Craft website.

“Maine designer Clint Chase acknowledges the influence of designers he admires, especially in his early work—Paul Gartside, Iain Oughtred, François Vivier, and Joel White in particular—but intuition also plays a big role in his boats. “I just draw until it looks right,” he says. Based on this new yawl of his, it’s an approach that works extremely well, if you have as good an eye as Clint Chase, and have spent as much time looking at boats as he clearly has.”

— Tom Pamperin, Small Boats Magazine

Meet the team!

Clint Chase - Owner, head designer, builder, and teacher

Clint Chase has been designing and building boats for 15+ years. He has been recognized by Small Boats magazine, Off Center Harbor, Wooden Boat Magazine and the woodenboat community as a leader in the field of small craft design, construction and exploration. His skills and experience led him to create Chase Small Craft in 2015 to share his passion for small boats with the world.

Clint’s interest in boats led him to the Landing School from where he graduated in 2006. From 2009-2012, Clint worked as a professional boat builder and began his first business as….you guessed it Clint Chase Boatbuilder. He feels luck to have gotten to know Michael Storer, Francois Vivier, and other designers early on, which led to a lot of learning and fast! In 2013, Clint began teaching at the Landing School in a new Small Boat Building program. While there, he was able to expand his design catalog a great deal while continuing a number of collaborations. When this teaching assignment ended in 2014, he went to work for Hamilton Marine in Portland, Maine and continued to think about a new approach to the business of small boats. He decided that the best way was to focus on kits and teaching.

Chase Small Craft was born in 2015 to help people build and launch their own boats from carefully designed, cut, and packaged kits. Our goal is to help our builders fulfill their dream of building a small boat. What makes Chase Small Craft unique is that our boats are exceptional small boats first -- fast, seaworthy, and beautiful -- and then the engineering gives ordinary home builders access to building these boats through the complete, precut wooden kits and supplies. The approach has matched Clint’s skill set profoundly: attention to detail, quality instruction, and a clear understanding of what makes the boat work on the water. His favorite saying is that he is always ‘sneaking up on perfection’.

His boats continue to evolve and new designs are continually made as he cuts and ships out complete kits from the shop in Saco, Maine. At our shop we CNC-cut the plywood ourselves, mill beautiful lumber into timber boat parts, and inventory the finest hardware and adhesives available for our boats. We teach workshops in our Saco location as well as at offsite locations including the Landing School and Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine. Some of our most popular classes are Introduction to Boatbuilding (a.k.a. Boatbuilding 101) and BYOB (Build-your-own-boat).

When not busy at Chase Small Craft, Clint loves spending quality time with his family on the water and in the woods in his beautiful home state of Maine.

Folks who have helped me a great deal in the shop and in the office are:

Pat Bailey
Ashley Crandall
Dexter Morse
Kate Grimes
Ross Spencer