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!

The Paine 15

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

Hi Folks-

I will be speaking and showing some examples of my latest designs at:

OCTOBER 20 & 21  LYMAN MORSE BOATBUILDING DESIGNERS’ SEMINAR  Thomaston, Maine

OCTOBER 28  THE CORINTHIANS ANNUAL MEETING  Marion, Massachussetts

Copies of my latest book will be available.

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.

We are all celebrating what would have been Andrew Wyeth’s hundredth birthday here on the coast of Maine. The boat depicted here was designed by Mark Fitzgerald at Paine Yacht Design as an 80th birthday present from his wife Betsy. He used Home Free to commute from the mainland to his studio out on Benner Island until his death at aged 90.

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!

Last Saturday evening I appeared at the East Greenwich Yacht Club (Rhode Island) to donate my oil painting “Wednesday Night Races” to the club.  It shows the Paine twins, at age 15, setting their spinnaker in their bright red bluejay, Scratch.  In 1958 as a teenager from the “wrong side of the tracks” who was fascinated by the idea of sailing but with no possible access to the sport owing to my parents’ abject poverty, a caring neighbor sponsored me and my twin in their youth sailing program. A lifetime of sailing fun, and sailing industry success, which engendered salaries for boat carpenters totaling over $175,000,000, resulted. Support community sailing!

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).

I have given two recent presentations to yacht clubs.

On March 19 I spoke at the Conanicut yacht Club in Jamestown, Rhode Island. Jamestown is the island on which I grew up, and first became fascinated with yachts.

Then on March 29 I spoke at the Royal Fowey Yacht Club in Cornwall, U.K.  I first travelled abroad in the summer of 1065 as a keen collegiate dinghy sailor. The first person I met was a former Exeter College, Oxford, sailor named Brian Appleton. We became friends and that friendship has lasted fifty years. So when he asked me to speak at his yacht club in Cornwall, how could I refuse. A good time was had by all, methinks.

If your yacht club is interested in a fascinating and visually stimulating presentation, I would love to oblige. No financial gain is sought- just reimbursement of my expenses.