Walk the suspension bridge over Carroll Creek on a January evening and the water looks two feet deep, dark, and busy. A three-masted schooner sits low against the current. A rowboat with a red octopus rising from its bow leans toward the far bank. Somewhere along the line, a boat built to look like it belongs to a dragon with feathers and wings bobs next to one shaped like an aircraft carrier. None of them are going anywhere. They've been anchored there since mid-November, and they'll stay through the second Saturday in March.
What most people watching from the bridge don't know is that the boats aren't sitting on open water. They're moored directly above a garden.
The Water Underneath the Water
Carroll Creek runs through downtown Frederick as an engineered channel, a flood-control measure the city built in the 1970s. The fix worked, but it created a side effect: shallow, slow-moving water grows algae fast. In 2012, a Frederick volunteer named Peter Kremers started a project called Color on the Creek to solve that problem the pretty way, filling the channel with water lilies, lotus, and other shade plants grown in submerged containers. The plants block sunlight, the algae doesn't take hold, and for most of the year the creek doubles as a floating garden.
The containers never come out. They sit below the surface year-round, holding plants that grow up to the waterline from May through the middle of October and then go dormant right where they are. That's the part of the operation almost no one watching the boats from the bridge realizes. When Kremers spoke to the Washington Post's creative content team about how the two projects fit together, he put it simply: the winter display "literally floats over the top of the dormant plants." About a month after the lilies finish their growing season, the same organization anchors its winter fleet in the same stretch of water, directly above the containers that grew the flowers a few weeks earlier. One nonprofit, one two-foot-deep channel, two completely different attractions running on the same submerged infrastructure.
A Garage Project With a Trophy Now
The winter half of that operation started almost by accident. In 2016, Kremers and a fellow Frederick resident named Kyle Thomas built a single miniature boat in a garage, a lit-up model they called the USS Hamster, and floated it in the creek that winter mostly to see what would happen. It stuck. The following year they invited other local businesses to sponsor and design their own boats, and turned the whole thing into a fundraising competition, with each boat tied to a Frederick County charity.
The fleet has grown every season since. Coloronthecreek.com puts the 2024-25 season at 26 sailing boats plus a land-locked entry. By 2025-26, the Downtown Frederick Partnership was listing 28 sailing boats and a couple of land-based additions. That's a fleet nearly thirty times the size of where it started, in under a decade, all of it built by volunteers with no paid staff, according to Color on the Creek's own description of itself as a "100% volunteer organization." The boats range from historically grounded builds, like a replica of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa, to pure Frederick inside jokes, including a trio of boats modeled on the Snallygaster, the county's homegrown cryptid.
The Economics of a Five-Dollar Vote
The fundraising mechanism is straightforward and has scaled with the fleet. Each vote for a favorite boat costs five dollars, and the money goes directly to that boat's designated nonprofit. In 2020, the event raised more than $67,000. By the 2021-22 season, that had grown to over $102,000, according to reporting from the Washington Post. By the 2024-25 season, visitfrederick.org reported the total had climbed past $140,000. That's better than doubling in about four years, without a gala, a silent auction, or a single paid fundraiser on staff. The money moves through small individual votes, cast by people who came downtown to look at lights and ended up donating to Heartly House, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, or Frederick Community College's foundation because a particular boat caught their eye.
Sponsors read like a cross-section of Frederick's own business community rather than a national brand list. Past seasons have included boats backed by Middletown Valley Bank, Morgan Keller Construction, Thompson Gas, Frederick Primary Care, and Truist, each one paired with a different local cause. The boats are decoration in the sense that they're built to be looked at, but the money attached to them behaves more like a distributed micro-philanthropy drive than a seasonal decoration budget.
What's Actually Floating This Year
Here's where a straight answer gets harder. As of this writing, Color on the Creek is still in its sponsor-interest phase for the 2026-27 season, collecting sign-ups from businesses that want to build or sponsor a boat rather than publishing a locked lineup. So the exact number of boats going in this November isn't public yet. What is established, based on the last several seasons, is the pattern: boats typically enter the water in mid-November, installed by volunteer crews using cranes and forklifts, with some volunteers wading directly into the cold creek in wetsuits to anchor hulls in place. The display runs through the second Saturday in March, visible day and night, with the lighting turning on at sunset.
If the growth trend from the last two documented seasons holds, this year's fleet should land somewhere at or above the 28-boat mark set in 2025-26. Whether it does is something the creek itself will answer in a few weeks, not something a fall blog post can promise.
The Rest of the Walk
The boats aren't the only thing running on Carroll Creek at the same time. The Downtown Frederick Partnership pairs the display with a season of other programming clustered within a few blocks:
- The Downtown Frederick Light Walk, a self-guided route through seven lighting installations around the historic district, with two new stops added for the most recent season
- The Kris Kringle Parade, which last ran on December 12 along Market Street before ending at the Baker Park Bandshell with the lighting of the city's Christmas tree
- Free weekend parking downtown from Thanksgiving through New Year's
- A $10 all-day trolley that loops past stops including Brewer's Alley and NOMA Gallery
- A Candlelight Tour of Historic Houses of Worship, letting visitors see multiple historic interiors in a single night
The creek walk itself sits within a five-minute stroll of Frederick's brewing corridor, including Idiom, Steinhardt, Attaboy, and RAK Brewing, along with McClintock Distilling's Back Bar and Tenth Ward Distilling's Cocktail Lab on East Patrick Street. None of that is incidental to the boats. It's the same three or four blocks doing triple duty as a flood channel, a floating garden, and a winter attraction, with a rotating cast of food trucks and bars absorbing the foot traffic each one brings.
That layering is the thing worth sitting with longer than a single evening walk allows. A creek dug for drainage in the 1970s now spends half the year growing flowers to hide its own algae and the other half hosting a fleet that floats directly above where those flowers were rooted weeks earlier, funded five dollars at a time by people who came to look and stayed to vote.
If you already know which boat you're rooting for this year, or you're curious what it's actually like to have Carroll Creek a few blocks from your front door year-round, not just in November, the Allwein Team is always up for that conversation. Book your free consultation whenever you're ready to talk about downtown Frederick beyond the lights.
