Shallow draft or standard draft

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Just what you would expect. The shallow draft loses on sailing performance, particularly to windward, but gains by allowing you access to some cruising grounds and harbours where deeper draft might be a restriction. For example the deep draft would be limiting in the French canals.

Depending on your style of sailing you may not notice the difference on your own, but it would become clear once you did a direct comparison.
 
My Beneteau 33.7 had the deep keel (2.1) which is relatively deep for a 10m boat. I am very concious of my draft and always have to state my draft when requesting a mooring, and also check the fall of tide once moored.

Boat points well though!
 
Personally it's about optimal sailing (rather than creek crawling) and for that you need a good deep keel, you can lower the draft by using lead but this becoming very expensive.
 
In general, Beneteaus sail better when they're kept as upright as possible. Heeling in a gust can quickly induce a lot of weather helm. So you'll gain a lot sailing the deeper keeled boat.

I'd say that unless you had a specific shallow draught requirement, go for the deeper keel. But I have to confess I'm biased towards deeper draught boats with a lot of lead in the keel. I've found no difficulty cruising with a 6'8" draught, although I admit there's a few places I dont try to go, having a faster boat means there are places further away that can easily be reached.
 
dt4134 said:
In general, Beneteaus sail better when they're kept as upright as possible. Heeling in a gust can quickly induce a lot of weather helm. So you'll gain a lot sailing the deeper keeled boat.

I'd say that unless you had a specific shallow draught requirement, go for the deeper keel. But I have to confess I'm biased towards deeper draught boats with a lot of lead in the keel. I've found no difficulty cruising with a 6'8" draught, although I admit there's a few places I dont try to go, having a faster boat means there are places further away that can easily be reached.
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Seconded.
 
I had a shallow draft Bev and it would not sail to windward in some seas we had to use the engine assist. You had to reef very early or the boat would either be on its ear or would round up.

I now have a boat with a lead keel which sails beautifully at all points of sail, I learned a lot from buying that boat. The Bev 36 came with two options shallow draft iron or deep lead. If you look at the early (2000ish) Bev 36's you will see that they can do really well in the RTI race so the keel is very important.
 
Seven Spades said:
I had a shallow draft Bev and it would not sail to windward in some seas we had to use the engine assist. You had to reef very early or the boat would either be on its ear or would round up.

I now have a boat with a lead keel which sails beautifully at all points of sail, I learned a lot from buying that boat. The Bev 36 came with two options shallow draft iron or deep lead. If you look at the early (2000ish) Bev 36's you will see that they can do really well in the RTI race so the keel is very important.
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What's a Bev (!)? Beneteau or Bavaria?
 
My last boat was shallow draft and was great for squeezing into some shallow anchorages. However she was squirrelly, needed early reefing and weather performance was fairly poor.

The current boat at 2.2M sails beautifully and suffers none of the above vices. However I do have to plan a bit more carefully which is in my opinion an acceptable price to pay for performance.
 
lloydpe1 said:
Beneteau Oceanis 40 - what are the pro's con's for a 6'9" vs 5'1" draft?
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Some shallow draft profiles are better than others eg Scheel and Tandem. But normally if your normal cruising grounds are not particularly restricting I would choose the deeper draft. How often will a 20" difference be critical?
 
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