The View from the Helm

All of your boat-loving friends will love their copy of Chuck’s latest book. Order them from this website. The cost is $23.50, including free shipping!

                  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/

My Talk in London

Here I am giving my talk at the Cruising Association in London. It went well judging by the fact that everyone was still awake after 70 minutes, and there were a few good laughs (most at my own expense). For the first time in nearly 40 years I divulged the identity of the lovely young lady who was the inspiration for my first design, the Frances 26. That’s her peeking at you, Frances Cairncross, now a world-famous economist and the rector (president) of Exeter College at Oxford. She was a wonderful dancer and turned me from a pathologically selfish 22-year old into a functioning human being.

If your friends, crew or spouse love boating, you could give them the best holiday gift ever. Chuck’s book on yacht design is the most informative, most lavishly illustrated, most appreciated gift you could give anyone who loves yachts. Don’t miss out—there are only 128 copies left in print so you will not have this opportunity next year! If you buy it on Amazon by clicking here,

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=yacht+design+paine&x=20&y=16

the shipping costs are slightly lower. If you buy it on this website Chuck Paine will happily endorse the book for the recipient. You can be a hero, but act now… they’ll be sold out by Christmas!

Dinner on the Krka River

         I got to thinking about one prediction I made in the conclusion to my recent book: “Surely in the near future some lad far cleverer with a computer than I ever was will write a computer program that will enable twenty or so would-be yachtsmen to share one very beautiful yacht as if it were solely their own.” 

        I watched the slow demise of my highly successful yacht design studio as the once too numerous to manage customers vanished over the horizon.  I had put it down to the lingering effects of 9/11, but perhaps I lost sight of a far more positive reason- the advent of chartering. Why would one own a yacht, with all of the maintenance expenses involved not to mention the depreciation- when one can  so easily and more cheaply charter. The happy group in the above photo, plus John the photographer, have chartered together for decades. We have enjoyed larger yachts than any of us could afford to own, have seen cruising grounds from Tahiti to Croatia, and have, at the end of one week in a climate far more amenable than the frozen wasteland of winter in Maine, simply handed back the keys at the end and told the charter company to fix anything that broke.

        Another prediction: The day will come when the rapidly rising cost of liquid energy and its attendant impact upon airfares will combine with one or more terrorist attacks upon this highly vulnerable mode of human transport to put an end to civilian air travel. And that will be the end of chartering.  Until that happens, though, this happy group will be posting photos like this one on this blog from some of the loveliest cruising grounds on God’s blue ocean.

I have just returned from London Boat Show. My primary purpose was to meet with the editor of ClassicBoat magazine, which will be publishing a series of articles about my classic designs. The show followed the recent trend of being smaller each year, though what was missing were the plethora of massive powerboats chasing the maybe two customers left in the world who would want such a thing. The ClassicBoat stand was once again the best part of the show… remember, everyone, that I predicted in my memoir that the world of boating would go full circle and that what will be left in the end will be traditionally shaped, aesthetically derived, small raceable sailboats made of a material that grows on trees. The other thing that was really fun was the huge new aquasport pool where I leaned against the railing and watched improbably tiny kids trying to get their floating windsurfers to the northern end of the pool against a fan-generated wind. This, and anything shorter than fifteen feet that doesn’t consume fuel, is the future of boating!