![]() He has ambitions to take the boat to Florida in the winter one of these years, and realizes that the original 12½ is just too much boat to tow those 1,500 miles behind his Subaru Outback. “I didn’t want a boat the size of a 12½,” said Paine. Over the course of our outing in AMELIA, as the new boat is called, the answer to my question-the rationale for the new boat-unfurled slowly but decidedly. Paine and I had met near his home in Tenants Harbor, Maine, on a blustery August afternoon. “I don’t know if it does,” he politely demurred. And so I asked Paine that question the day I met him for a sail aboard the new boat. With all of the other H12½ derivatives on the market-and the new originals-I couldn’t help but wonder why the world needed another one. ![]() 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. 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. 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. In the early 1980s, Joel White conceived a shallower-draft centerboard version. 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.įrom the success of this legendary design came derivatives. 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. ![]() Herreshoff built 364 of them before the business closed and production moved to the Quincy Adams yard. 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. 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. The unstayed carbon-fiber rig weighs but 20 lbs, and the boat is easily trailered behind a mid-sized car. The boat is based on the venerable Herreshoff 12½, but is 45 percent smaller. Designer Chuck Paine enjoys a sail in his newly launched Paine 14.
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