Bilge keels are Better??

[boatmike]

Have you blokes forgotten my reputation for being a pedantic boring old fart or are you just trying to make me feel good today?
Hmmm I suppose "sage" could be thought of as a sort of "Gandolf" character..... Naa! That's "Old Salt" /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[DJE]

So that's Straitshooter.
To be honest now that the kids don't sail with us anymore a fin keel 34 is pretty high on my wish list but we would miss a lot of our shallow draft haunts.

 

[PeterGibbs]

Nice picture - somehow you knew that taking the ground just there was not to put you on a block of discarded concrete or rocks?

Thought so - waiting a tide to discover whether to take the ground didn't seem to me like a good use of the summer...

PWG

 

[rwoofer]

As an owner of a high performance bilge keeler (an RM880), I would say that the design of the overall boat is what gives it high performance rather than the twin keels themselves. I know Marc Lombard seems to advocate the hydrodynamic benefits of twin keels which I believe are real, but they need to outweight the additional wetted surface area - I'm not sure they do.

Most current or ex-racers who have helmed my boat would not know it was a twin keeler - only back to back sailing with a monokeel version would show any differences at all. That means for 99% of cruising sailors the twin keels offer as much performance as mono keel.

So, what well designed twin keels give you is the benefits of shallow draft and drying out with a very minimal impact on performance. For me it is the perfect compromise and I'm a total convert. Oh, and I have raced my RM twice and got a first and second, so plenty fast enough.

 

[charles_reed]

Properly designed they probably are, most Brit bilge-keelers have a much shallower draught and reduced rig-height than their centre-keel alternatives, hence their less than adequate performance.

There's a company in la Rochelle building some flat-out wood-epoxy twin keelers, their 54' has similar performance to an Open 60 BUT
its draught is (from memory) 2.4m and it can't dry out on the keels which have an incredibly high aspect ratio. Interestingly the keels have an 18° dihedral. I saw it at the laRochelle Expo about 4 years ago.

 

[DJE]

[ QUOTE ]
Nice picture - somehow you knew that taking the ground just there was not to put you on a block of discarded concrete or rocks?

[/ QUOTE ]
I sort of looked over the side a bit, didn't take a whole tide. With four foot draft I can always go for a walk round the boat just before we take the ground.

 

[Drascomber]

Nah! what ya' need is twin lifting centreplates like a Drascombe Drifter 22.

 

[ShipsWoofy]

I have always maintained, buying a boat that will not dry out on an Island with some of the biggest tides in the world is at best short sighted.

Unless you are an out and out racer, a single keel just restricts any cruising you might do.. Oooh look, another pretty NCP marina. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif