I first sailed into Bequia in 1975. In those days the boys of the town were carving boat models out of coconuts and selling them to the tourists. Over the years the bar was raised. A few years ago they moved off of the beach and got a little shop. But even today the models, though much improved, still are carved by hand, show slight imperfections, and are not of molded fiberglass imported from China! Buy one soon, for this will sadly change.
Doing what I love best
In late March I got to sail in the Grenadines with a bunch of my friends. There is NOTHING in the world more fun than this! As I view this I notice that I’m aging at age 65.
PETUNIA in 2010
Here’s PETUNIA in my barn at the end of a long Maine winter. I figured after 73 years it was time to take her brightwork completely down to wood, sand and resand it, then seal and build up the varnish to take her the next 73 years. She’s in close to new condition, and no, she’s not and will never be for sale!
She's chunky, but all you need in Bokeelia, Florida.
HogtrougH is short and sweet. She’s of molded fiberglass and the tooling is exquisite. Howcum we’ve never heard of boats like this up in Maine?
The owner was painting Mayaca when I visited Pine Island, Florida.
Mayaca is much bigger than Egret. It was impossible to get far enough away from her to get a good photo. She has about 4 1/2 foot headroom and an interior that is divided in half by the centerboard trunk. I’d fix that by eliminating the centerboard and fitting my unique bilge boards. They’re not solid, and by eliminating half their wetted surface and alternating fat foil blades with empty spaces, their lift coefficient more than makes up for their halved area. At their bottom there are massive stainless steel grounding bars. At Mayaca’s size I figure I could get her to sail really well- better than with a centerboard- at about two feet of draft. Naturally she’d have the same rudder I mentioned previously.
Egret is a REAL sharpie.
Here’s Egret. She’s a real sharpie of the Commodore Monroe type. Hard to imagine a little yacht that looks more the part for her element. (her element being really shallow water). Of course if I designed one while she’d look almost exactly like this she’d have little, invisible improvments. One would be my “Paine turning fork rudder”. It looks just like a tuning fork and by introducing one consonant I came up with a name for it. It is half the depth of a conventional rudder but, being twins, just as effective.
New Paine 26 Sailplan
I got to thinking, maybe the idea of having no permanent backstay was not such a good one after all. I always worried when the owners of the prototype, who were relatively inexperienced, went sailing on windy days. I raised the height of the rig to compensate for the little bit of lost sail area. If I ever build this one, all this agonizing will make her the best sailboat built this century. But let me know- maybe you don’t think so???
One thing I’m doing in my enforced retirement is driving the ambulance at our town’s all-volunteer Fire and Ambulance Association. This has involved over six months of training, and I still have a great deal to learn. As the world transitions to a smaller and more sustainable economy we need more dedication to helping our neighbors, and sadly, we also need far fewer yachts. But the ones we still have will be true masterpieces. Gone will be the mass-produced “clorox bottles” from our recent bout of unsustainable overconsumption. What you’ll begin to see will be magnificent though physically small works of art from the hands of masters. Maybe even one or two more from my own hand.
The PAINE 26
Now’s the time to clean out the barn and start building. In every century there’s one boat that makes sense for the times. In the last, it was the Herreshoff 12 1/2. In this one, it’s her big sister. Let me know- I can help.
The Paine 26
A Maine winter is coming on so I had to do this oil painting of the Paine 26 I hope to build someday. She’s a scaled up Herreshoff 12 1/2.
