Lifelong Shelburne boatbuilder retires: ‘I knew how to build a boat when I was 15 years old’

He was only a kid when he knew boatbuilding was what he wanted to do for his life’s work, getting his early learning in the trade from the pages of boatbuilding books read while skipping school in the late 1940s. For close to 70 years, Roland DesChamp Sr., Shelburne, has been building boats, including the last 55 years running his family business, DesChamp and Jackson Boatbuilders Ltd. At 85, he has decided it’s time to give it up and has sold the business, but not the name, which will surely go down in the local history books as one of Shelburne’s most celebrated builders. >click to read<20:25

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.