short keel
I have the 5' keel and it works great here in the shallow waters of Galveston Bay. I can go places my dock neighbor can't with his 6'11" keel. He has to motor down the ship channel to get to Galveston while I sail down on the east side of the channel.As far as performance, I'm not a racer so I can't tell you how it ranks, but I remember one day when there were 3 boats (that kind of makes a race) heading the same direction, mostly. I had to give way to the other two because they were slightly coming my way, but we went side by side for quite a while. The boat with the right of way was a 42' hunter, the middle boat was a 34' pearson, and me a 376 hunter. I only had half of my main up in about 16 apparent kts and was heeled over about 10*. I could have had more main out but was expecting it to build to over 20 kts that day. Anyway...the pearson took us both but it took a while. I think I was doing 6.2 SOG and that is slow for my boat on a close reach. I'm sure if I let out more sail I could have taken both, but I was enjoying the conversation I was having and was more curious as to who was going to win out of those two...they were very close to each other and I was about 100 yards away. Summary: Short keel does just fine, but I would never say it's a racing boat.