Wings of Grace
Classic cruiser

Take a patient client with a love of John Alden’s work, a designer with one of the best eyes in the business and a great boatyard and you will get a boat like Wings of Grace. This custom boat designed by Chuck Paine is a replica, almost, of Alden’s designs but augmented in hull form to enhance the performance without losing the overall aesthetic.

Like the Anna project this is asking a lot of the designer. Make no mistake, you cannot duplicate the shapes of the 1930s and not give away boat speed. Overhangs are beautiful but they cost DWL. Heart-shaped transoms and spoon bows look great but they do not lend themselves to modern sectional shapes for either bow or stern. The designer’s job is to decide what features he will maintain and what features he will update. Chuck chose to maintain all the shape features you can see topsides and to modify the keel; but not much. S&S modified Anna’s full keel with a fin and bulb keel. Chuck chose to stick with the full keel in profile but to give it a NACA foil section with the max thickness at about the 30-percent chord line and a 10-percent thickness ratio. Chuck also exaggerated the prop aperture so he could extend the rudder blade forward of the stock for some balance. Heart-shaped transoms aren’t fast with their concave sections, but who can resist that shape on a boat like this? I have a shot of Wings of Grace taken from the stern and that transom is perfect. The D/L is 323. If you use a full keel it is almost impossible to get the D/L down below 300.

This ketch rig shows a large mizzen and a bowsprit of moderate length. The SA/D is 18.19 and that’s enough for good speed while not making the boat too demanding to handle. In breeze you can shorten sail on this rig by just dropping the mizzen. Two headsails are flown all the time. This may not be the closest winded of rigs but it is certainly in concert with the long keel shape and the potential of the ketch configuration. If you used one jib and jammed this boat up on the wind that big mizzen would suffocate. Call this a reaching rig.

I like this layout. It has one big head with a spacious shower stall. There are accommodations for two couples with a quarterberth to starboard for an extra guest. The big galley could not be better. The nav station is nicely integrated into the saloon and the port dinette is large. The settee to starboard is deep for comfortable lounging. I’d lose those big radii though. They look sexy on drawings but I am firmly convinced that the human body is drawn to corners. We seek corners to nestle in for security. Maybe that’s too Freudian for you but I have found it to be true. The mainmast comes through the interior at an unfortunate place, restricting access to the dinette’s forward leg. But rigged as a sloop it would have done the same thing to the aft leg of the dinette. Masts can be a nuisance during the
design process.

This boat was exquisitely built by French & Webb of Belfast, Maine, for Michael and Leslie Rindler of Southwest Harbor Maine. Construction is cold molded.

I don’t think Chuck wears white shirts and ties. I have never seen him wear a vest and I can’t imagine he’d ever dream of smoking a pipe. But Chuck has no problem grabbing a nice flexible plastic spline, a flock of lead ducks and springing that sheer over and over until he thinks it’s perfect before even getting near the computer. I just bet if John Alden walked down the dock tomorrow and saw Wings of Grace he’d say, “That’s a very fine yacht.”