Mystic — In the shadow of the Charles W. Morgan, 11 year-old Samantha Goulston built her own boat.

Goulston and her family have been coming from Killingly to the WoodenBoat Show at the Mystic Seaport for five years, and thanks to a North Carolina yacht design company, they've come away with a handmade boat every time.

Samantha looked proudly over her new canoe, drying in the sun under a first coat of epoxy.

B&B Yacht Designs brought the wood, the epoxy and a few tools, and showed a few families how to put their sailboats and canoes together over the course of the 25th annual three-day event celebrating all things wooden boat.

“We like building them — we like doing things ourselves,” said Lori Goulston, Samantha’s mother.

Goulston said she brings Samantha to the show each year to teach her a lesson about the value of hard work and handmade things.

“Stuff today is made so cheaply,” she said. “This will go in the water today, which is why we’re so excited.”

The Seaport was filled with boat owners, boat makers and vendors, all eager to talk about the merits of a good wooden boat.

Inside the nearby tent, John Page and his two grandsons were mixing epoxy and adding another layer to the inside of their B&B wooden sailboat, which the boys would take home to Natick, Mass., after Sunday on top of a car.

“Really carefully,” Page said.

Page, who used to race sailboats and owns a 22-foot boat in Boston Harbor, brought his grandsons to pass on the tradition.

“It’s going to be their boat,” he said. “We built it, we made it. It’s using new technology, but it’s still a wooden boat.”

Oliver, 12, and Declan, 15, walked around the boat and took a closer look at the epoxy.

“It’s a piece of craftsmanship,” Page said. “It’s tradition. It’s long-lasting.”

At the end of the Seaport sat the Hōkūle‘a, a 62-foot double-hulled replica of a Polynesian sailing canoe, which stopped in Mystic this week on a multi-year trip around the world to raise awareness of Polynesian maritime culture and ocean conservation.

The boat has stopped in 11 ports along the East Coast and will leave Mystic this week for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine before heading to South America.

The wood and fiberglass boat represents the distinct Polynesian traditions of boat making and navigation, but Michelle Knoetgen, a Hōkūle‘a crew member and education specialist, said the canoe has plenty in common with boats like the Charles W. Morgan whaling ship.

“What unites us is a love of sailing, and a love of ocean craft,” she said, adding that the Hōkūle‘a’s message of conservation has resonated with people in Mystic and in other places along the boat’s route.

“If people love the ocean, they love to care for the ocean,” she said. “There are deep cultural ties because of seafaring.”

In a section of the Seaport dedicated to handmade boats, Lynn Head sat aboard the Virginia Bailey, a glass cabin launch she and her husband finished last July.

The motorboat, which won a “best in show” prize Sunday, was designed to fit on a trailer and serve as a place where the Heads can sleep, cook and eat on trips from their home in Concord, N.H.

“I couldn’t just live on one boring lake," Head said. "I want to see lots of lakes.”

Fully customized, down to rods for drying bathing suits and an outhouse on the front deck, the boat was a labor of love, she said.

“People want to do something you can call all your own. It hearkens back to those days of being a little more leisurely and a little more earthy — wooden boats tend to be like that,” she said.

For Pierre Fiore, wooden boats represent a work in progress — his boat’s name is Imperfection.

“Don’t make perfect the enemy of good,” Fiore recited Sunday. “There’s nothing wrong with imperfection.”

And the constant search for the perfect boat doesn’t mean people can’t have a good time.

“Boats are cool, and boat people are cool,” he said. "Just nice people in general."

m.shanahan@theday.com