I'm looking at a
boat with a wing
keel and I am curious how the wings are constructed. Is the whole
keel, fin and wings, just a
single piece of molded lead? Or is there an internal frame structure?
I have little experience with external, bolt-on lead keels. In an encapsulated keel, the strength (in regards to
storage on the hard, groundings, and low-tide bumping at anchor) is in the
fiberglass hull. On a normal external lead fin, I would imagine that it's pretty much all compressive strength of the lead, and it might get dented up a bit, but that's all. On a wing keel, if the wings are just molded lead, and there is some sort of upwards load that is not even across the bottom of the fin or in the center of the fin, then you have a bending moment on the wing(s). Are you just depending on the bending strength of lead at that point?
I would ideally never ground the
boat or
anchor in
water so shallow that I risk bumping the bottom. But I just read a long thread about
draft in the
bahamas, and a lot of people were talking like it was inevitable and normal to run aground at times or bump at
anchor.