Sailing is full of compromises and boats with swing keels are one of them. They will never be as fast or agile as their fin-keeled cousins, but how gratifying it is when you are running out of water to have the ability to reduce your draught by a couple of feet! Here, on the Essex coast, amid the Thames estuary sandbanks, it feels less of a compromise and more of a godsend.
However, I have learned – after an alarming experience where the keel fell off – that there are a couple of things I need to keep an eye on.
If you have bought or owned a sailing boat of a ‘certain vintage’ in the last 20 years, you will almost certainly have spent hours scouring the internet for articles about your latest craft. This is what I did in 2016 when I bought my swing-keel Pandora 700. She was built around 1980 by Rydgeway Marine and had a somewhat chequered history.
Keen to find out as much as I could about the class, history, performance and construction, I went online searching for Pandora. I found a few for yachts for sale and lots of jewellery adverts, but little else until I came across pandorasailing.com, a brilliant site run by the South Caernarvonshire Yacht Club in Abersoch, North Wales. They race a good fleet of Pandoras (fin keelers) and there isn’t much they don’t know about sailing, rigging and fixing them.
Double take
Esta historia es de la edición February 2021 de Practical Boat Owner.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 2021 de Practical Boat Owner.
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