A well-designed lifting keel can be very efficient and fast.

Catamaran keel types. On a typical conventional 30 sailboat 10000 lbs where just the lead keel alone weighs 4000 lbs you are not going to notice an extra 1000 pounds of payload in the same way you will when you put in onto a catamaran where the whole cat like our 28 Woods Gypsy only weighs 4000 pounds. A full keel as the name implies runs almost the entire length of the boat. A full keel runs from end to end of the boat lengthways.

At a minimum it must run 50 of the length of the boat. Twin keels known as bilge keels allow yachts to dry out sitting upright and sometimes used in conjunction with a fin keel. The choice of having daggerboards is mostly a compromise between comfort and performance.

Daggerboards make the cat able to sail closer upwind and the boards are made to enhance the speed. The most common types of sailboat keels include full-length fin short wingbulb bilge and centerboard keels. There is a wide variety of keels each with particular characteristics that make them more suitable for certain types of navigation.

Our 526 keeled version draws about 12 inches more than the daggerboarded version. Its important to understand how a keel works when operating a sailboat with a monohull since its one of the main reasons a sailboat can move forward without tipping. On daggerboarded cats the rudder tip usually represents her deepest draft.

Internal keel boxes reduce accommodation space. Some variations of fin keel have bulbs or wings at the tip that concentrate the weight down low. The boat is controlled by a wheel or tiller.

The full keel is one of the most common types of the keel that you are likely to see on a sailboat. 4 depicts a catamaran of the present invention on the verge of lifting the windward hull free of the water. A keel is a wing-like object that sticks out of the bottom of the hull in the water and provides a sailboat with ballast for stability.