Frances sailboats: a Maine hull built twice on opposite sides of the Atlantic
Chuck Paine came up with the idea for the Frances 26 while backpacking through Scotland in the early 1970s, at age 30, inspired by the double-ended fishing boats he saw working the country's east coast. What began as a design in a notebook became a boat built independently by two yards three thousand miles apart, each working from a version of the same hull after two separate fires bookended its history.
Origins and ownership
Paine laid up the first Frances 26 hull in GRP in his Maine workshop in 1974, but the boat was destroyed by fire before it was finished. Tom Morris of Morris Yachts had already taken a mould of that hull, though, and Morris Yachts went on to build boats from it -- Classic Boat Magazine credits the yard with more than 100, though other sourcing on the model puts the figure closer to 35. Paine himself fitted out the fourth boat off the mould for his own use and cruised her along the East Coast of America. Tom Morris (1940-2008) had launched Morris Yachts in 1972; his son Cuyler joined the company in 1995, and the yard grew into a builder of semi-custom sailboats now numbering well over 300.
The design crossed the Atlantic after a Yachting World review caught the enthusiasm of editor Bernard Hayman in the late 1970s; his encouragement helped Southampton-based Victoria Marine, later renamed Victoria Yachts, win the rights to build the Frances 26 in the UK -- for years the company was based at the former Rampart Boat Building Works yard in Southampton.
Construction through the eras
Victoria Marine had its hulls moulded by Northshore Yachts of Havant, Hampshire, in solid 9.5oz GRP, then fitted them out and marketed the boats itself. UK production ran until the late 1990s, when the moulds for the Frances 26 -- and its UK sibling, the Victoria 26 -- were destroyed by fire and never remade, an odd echo of the fire that had already claimed Paine's original hull. On the American side, Morris Yachts describes building its boats by hand, one at a time, for more than 40 years.
Lines and generations
The UK-built Frances 26 differed from the original in a shallow well forward of the mast and a coachroof giving standing headroom below. It was joined in production by the Victoria 26, which shared the same hull but carried a larger coachroof. Paine also designed two siblings, a 24-foot Carol and a 30-foot Leigh, the latter later built by Victoria Yachts; in Classic Boat's account, Victoria Yachts continued to build Paine's larger Victoria 34 and 38 even after the Frances 26, Carol, and Leigh went out of production. Separately, catalog records list a Maurice Griffiths-designed Francis Drake 37 from around 1970; despite the similar name, it has no design or construction relationship to Paine's Frances 26.
Who Frances is for
A Frances or Victoria 26 suits a sailor drawn to a small, seaworthy double-ender with a documented transatlantic history rather than one line among many at a mass-production yard. Morris Yachts, which built the American side of the story, says that to its knowledge every boat it has ever built is still sailing today except for one -- a 25-foot Friendship Sloop used as a prop in the movie The Truman Show.
