The View from the Helm

The Paine 15 is the finest small sailboat designed in many a year. Come for a sail with me in Tenants Harbor and order one from Todd French and she will enhance your life  immensely.

York 18 Hull Plug nearing completion

The York 18 hull pattern is near completion. Here she is getting her final coats of wax before the mold is taken off. This is some of the finest tooling I have ever seen. It is absolutely fair and smooth, and the sheerline has been tweaked to be utter perfection. It has been years since a small sailboat has been introduced to the sailing fratenity. This one will be of the highest achievable quality as I think you can easily discern. Progress should be rapid now- there are two yachts on order and demand is strong.

YORK 18 HULL PATTERN

The Paine 15

French and Webb Boatbuilders of Belfast, Maine will be building a new PAINE 15 for late Spring delivery next year.

AMELIA has become a wonderful boat salesman this summer. She has taken four persons sailing, and of those, all four have liked her performance so much they have commissioned new boats. Two are building the slightly enlarged PAINE 15 at French&Webb, and two have commissioned the further scaled-up YORK 18 at Michael York’s shop in Rockland.  Nice job, Amelia!

AMELIA, our demonstrator PAINE 14, has found a new home. We will miss her but the more of them that are built, the more beautiful our harbors will become.

Must be something in the water-  this July a PAINE 15 has been ordered from French & Webb of Belfast, Maine, for delivery next Spring. The PAINE 15 is a slightly larger version of the 14. They will be built in WEST System cold molded construction, and trimmed with varnished teak or mahogany. Needless to say they are not inexpensive, but utterly beautiful.

Chuck Paine designs were never strictly designed for racing. They were designed to sail fast through the water and to point really well, of course, and to look aesthetically gorgeous, but with never a thought to the handicap rating. Everyone knows if you distort a hull just a little bit you can achieve a “rule beater” that will deliver a high “corrected time” – until the rule changes. That’s the problem, though. The handicap formula changes over time, so today’s rule beater becomes tomorrow’s dog.

Paine designs were arrived at in a different way. The major design offices apart from Chuck Paine’s were located in big and expensive cities – New York City, Newport, San Diego and Annapolis. Rents and salaries were sky high. This limited the time that could be spent on each design. Chuck Paine’s office was located in Camden, Maine, and despite its beautiful waterfront location cost less than half the rent of his high-flying competitors. And his staff of up to five highly skilled designers all chose the lifestyle of rural Maine over the big expensive cities with their traffic and stress, and were content with the more modest salaries that went with it. A few lucky early breaks in Chuck’s early career meant that significant royalties poured in from such famous yacht builders as Morris, Able, Cabo Rico, Kanter, Bowman and Victoria Yachts and others.

The combination of low costs and a regular flow of income meant that Paine designs could consume a lot more hours of skilled work, and cost the patron not a penny more than the big-city competitors. Every Chuck Paine design had its hull personally sculpted by Chuck himself. All of the designs now winning races were designed in the ancient “Herreshoff” fashion. Chuck Paine himself would produce the preliminary design, then hand-carve a sugar pine half model of the hull- even if subsequently the hull lines were transferred to a computer for additional benefits. The use of a half model enabled Chuck to use not only his eyes but his hands to achieve complete hull fairness in every respect of the word. Only now, many years and handicap rule iterations later, is the result of this laborious process becoming recognized. There is simply no other design that is as “fair” (resulting in just a tiny bit less resistance to passage through the water) nor as aesthetically pleasing as one from of the office of Chuck Paine.

And as a result:

MARION-BERMUDA RACE 2017

First in Class , first in fleet:    SELKIE   Morris Ocean 32.5   Skipper Chip Bradish

First in Class                           ESCAPADE  Morris Ocean 46   Skipper Tom Bowker

BERMUDA ONE-TWO

Newport to Bermuda (Singlehanded)

First in Class, first in fleet:     YANKEE GIRL  Morris Ocean 36  Skipper S. Zachary Lee

Second in Class, 4^th in fleet:    BLUEBIRD         Morris Ocean 36   Skipper Gust Stringos

Bermuda to Newport (doublehanded)

First in Class:                          BLUEBIRD         Morris Ocean 36

Second in Class:                      YANKEE GIRL  Morris Ocean 36

Congratulations to the skippers and crews for their fine performances!

Here’s AMELIA sitting on her mooring in Port Clyde last summer. Soon enough she’ll be waiting for me there again- unless someone buys her first (she is for sale).

Newly available, too late for Christmas. But you can have one if you want.  My twenty favorite designs from my own studio, plus three sailboats by other designers that have enhanced my life.  Order from the home page- you will love it!.

Also available on Amazon.com, print version only.

                  I’ve just published my latest book on the subject of yacht design. THE BOATS I’VE LOVED- 20 classic sailboat designs, by Chuck Paine. This 108-page print or e-book features my selection of the finest small sailboat designs from my forty-year career as a designer, plus three other “boats I’ve loved” from the hand of Olin Stephens and Nat Herreshoff. Packed with beautiful photograps and a lifetime’s worth of advice about my most popular sailboat designs, most of which can be bought on the used boat market for a modest price, spruced up a bit and taken sailing for years to come. I never designed anything but the best quality yachts- read all about them here and if you’ve got any sense, buy one and sail away

You can get yours by going here:

http://www.chuckpaine.com/my-new-book/

This is Bella Luna– a modified Herresoff Alerion with a fixed keel.  DON”T built an Alerion until you have consulted with us- the centerboard versions are very tender and hard to steer. With our new fixed keel and rudder, and carbon spars, the boat is an absolute delight.