Swing keel calamity

Terry Abel repairs his Pandora 700 after a sobering shakedown sail

- Terry Abel

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