Twin Keel Performers

Don’t be fooled into thinking twin keels means stodgy performance – some can really fly, says Peter Poland.

- Peter K Poland

In the frenetic yet halcyon days of fast-selling Hunter Sonata and Impala cruiser-racers, I foolishly regarded bilge keels as performance sapping abominations. I thought they looked like casually designed afterthoughts sprouting beneath nice hulls and assumed that their sole purpose was to stand a boat on its own two feet.

The boats that our company built, on the other hand, were aimed at people we thought of as serious sailors – and we rashly believed that anything other than a state-of-the-art fin or lifting keel flyer would be unlikely to satisfy them.

But when my personal circumstances underwent a change, I had to think again. Ignoring my prejudices, I spent my own hard earned cash on a second-hand bilge keeler. Why, you may well ask? Simple. My factory and home were on the East Coast but most of the high profile regattas took place down south. So I needed a comfortable floating base that could live on a cheap mud mooring, follow the circuits where the cruiser-racers I built competed, and act as a photo launch and mobile home. A bit of leisurely weekend sailing would be an added bonus. With a limited budget there was one obvious solution. A Westerly Centaur.

Unbeknown to me at the time, this model’s twin keel design had been a game-changer. When Westerly founder and designer Denys Rayner retired and handed over the reins to a young David Sanders he advised him to ask Laurent Giles to design future models.

Rayner was aware of the bilge keel development work this famous design office had done, so he believed they were the most likely to lift bilge keel design to new heights.

It was wise advice. Barry van Geffen (previously with Laurent Giles as a designer, later as a partner and now owner of LG (NZ) Ltd and the LG Archive) told me how the new generation bilge keels as first used on the Centaur came into being.