The Paine 14

Art Paine

Designer Chuck Paine enjoys a sail in his newly launched Paine 14. The boat is based on the venerable Herreshoff 12½, but is 45 percent smaller. The unstayed carbon-fiber rig weighs but 20 lbs, and the boat is easily trailered behind a mid-sized car.

The venerable Herreshoff 12½, which will turn 100 years old in 2014, is widely regarded as one of the—no, the—finest daysailer ever designed. Such a statement seems hyperbolic until one considers that the 12½'-waterline sloop has been in continuous production since the first one rolled out of the Herreshoff factory in 1914, and over those 100 years an average of 30 boats per year have been built. Herreshoff built 364 of them before the business closed and production moved to the Quincy Adams yard. Quincy Adams built 51 of the boats before Cape Cod Shipbuilding picked up the mantle, building 35 wooden hulls before switching to a long run of fiberglass ones. Doughdish, Inc. also builds a fiberglass 12½—an exact copy of the Herreshoff original—and Artisan Boatworks has built a few new wooden ones, and is willing and able to do more.From the success of this legendary design came derivatives. In the early 1980s, Joel White conceived a shallower-draft centerboard version. He widened the hull slightly to offset the loss of stability caused by the shallower draft, but his Haven 12½ in the water is nearly identical to the original Herreshoff model. Designer-builder John Brooks has recently launched a glued-lapstrake plywood interpretation of the design, and Phil Bolger, at the time of his death in 2009, had just sailed and praised highly a sheet-plywood interpretation that he’d devised. And now Chuck Paine, who retired from active designing a few years ago, has just unveiled a scaled-down version of the boat—a beautiful 60-percent miniature of the classic Herreshoff 12½ with some decidedly contemporary updates, including an unstayed carbon-fiber rig and foil-shaped fin keel and rudder.