a couple on the hard in Toronto. My first thought was, "the keel is going to fall off of these". I guess it doesn't happen routinely, but once is too often. You hope that the Farr office would have the engineering resources to do this properly, but they have a history of fragile boats. One look at that one and a flood of questions appear. If you do not have the knowledge or will to engineer a fin properly, then stick to the stone knives and bearskins approach of full keels with encapsulated lead. "An engineer has got to know his limitations". There is no reason to design it as they did - not complexity, not performance, not cost, not labor - it is simply ignorance. Many design offices seem to rely on the ABS standards, last updated in the '90s and not particularly conservative even for its intended target: a lead shoe bolted onto a fiberglass keel stub.

Beyond the keel bolts themselves (often very aggressively stressed) there is often a lack of understanding of the crush forces on the leeward side. These are concentrated along a narrow line at the edge of the keel, once the fiberglass or lead is deformed a little bit then the keel starts to move and the end is not far away.