These are hard times to practice the fine art of going aground

The keel was a thing of beauty, a thin appendage, rounded in the front, gently swelling toward the middle, tapering to a sharp trailing edge; its foot, not burdened by one of the massive bulbs so common on performance designs today, was delicate. The boat the keel was attached to wasn’t shabby either, though the hull was so far above my vantage point on the hard that I couldn’t appreciate its finer points. The keel was so high, or deep, that when launched the boat would draw a full 11 feet.

The boat was launched in just over 10 feet of water. When it was backed out of the launching well, the fine edge of that elegant keel had to plow a furrow through the bottom to get to deeper water. A bystander commented, “Don’t worry, it’s only mud. That keel is going to bump into stuff a lot harder than that before the summer’s over.”

Ain’t it the truth? Going aground is inevitable. Grounding, hitting the bricks, getting stuck on the putty, whatever you call it, everyone does it sooner of later. That has always been true, but now it hurts more than it used to. The full-keel boats that were once the norm could meet the bottom and usually depart little the worse for the event. When a modern deep-draft fin-keeler has that encounter, it’s often an insurance event.

Full-keel boats are so bottom friendly that in areas with robust tides they have traditionally been put on the ground on purpose for bottom maintenance or cleaning when the tide ebbs. Don’t try that with a racing keel.

The Brits, whose island has some harbors that are rendered almost dry by the tides, have gone one better with twin-keel boats designed expressly to go aground. Their forte is sitting on the bottom level as a church. Truth is, they’re much better at this than at sailing.

There are still plenty of cruising boats being built, a few full-keelers and others with sturdy bolt-on keels, for which going aground is no big deal. But any monohull of a high-performance bent is, well, likely to get bent if it touches the ground.

The likelihood of that happening becomes greater with each new racing design generation. Boats are growing as never before—downward. There seems to be an inverse relationship at work here: Hulls are getting shallower—to the point now where there is hardly anything left in the water—and keels are diving to new depths. The reason for the trend is no mystery—boats like these sail a lot faster than their shallower-keeled predecessors.

Drafts have dropped a long way in a relatively short time. It wasn’t that long ago that a competitive 50-foot racing boat, say one of Ted Hood’s centerboarders, could have half the draft of a modern 50-foot racer.

Today’s ultra-deep keel boats are fast in deep water, but slow in harbors. In fact, sometimes when inshore they don’t move at all. That was the case several years ago when Larry Ellison, of America’s Cup and Oracle software fame, brought his 80-foot Sayonara to Lake Michigan to break the Chicago-Mackinac Race elapsed time record. It turned out he didn’t break anything other than the bottom of his keel and maybe the elapsed time record for the most time spent on the ground as his 15-foot keel tried to bore into the rocky Mackinac Island bottom. On the bright side, Sayonara’s visit buoyed the Lake Michigan boatyard economy.

I took no joy in watching Sayonara’s ordeal, though I’ll admit that other people’s adventures in running aground and trying to get off can make fascinating theater. The closest I’ve come to actually enjoying an act of going aground was when a boat that had been dogging us relentlessly in a long day race cut a corner in a attempt to take the lead and hit the bricks with a crash that was amplified across the water by her drumlike aluminum hull. We suppressed all smiles and unseemly commentary until we were out of range, which didn’t take long, because our adversaries definitely weren’t moving.

I think they eventually used the boat’s engine to power off the rocky shelf. That option, of course, is available for only superficial groundings.

Otherwise, freeing a monohull, if you rule out having it pulled off by brute force, and if kedging off with an anchor fails, involves heeling. I’ve seen 10 crewmen arrayed on a swung-out boom to induce heeling. It wasn’t as effective as the old standby of passing a halyard to another boat to pull on the mast and thus angle the keel up.

I don’t intend to chronicle my own adventures on the bottom here—I’m only allowed 1,200 words—but I’ll mention one in the interest of adding to the body of knowledge concerning the art off getting ungrounded. It wasn’t my boat, but I was at the helm. It’s not a good excuse, but I was young and distracted by the abundance of bikinis and beverages aboard. I drove the boat at 8 knots onto a Tampa Bay spoil bank.

We were well and truly stuck. Having failed at kedging off, we were discussing alternatives (like waiting for an unusually high tide) when some do-gooder passerby called the Coast Guard. To our profound embarrassment, they showed up in a helicopter, which drew a fine crowd to witness our foolish plight. But then . . . deliverance! The chopper maneuvered closer—probably to give the crew a better view of the bikinis arrayed on our deck—and its prop wash hit our sails, still set and trimmed, like a hurricane gust. Knocked down, rail in the water, we shot off that spoil bank as though launched by a giant slingshot.

Mirabella V wasn’t so lucky—not that that the wind produced by a single helicopter was likely to blow her off the bottom. Mirabella, at 245 feet LOA, is the world’s largest sloop and the world’s biggest private sailing yacht and, I’m going to take a wild guess and say, though this isn’t official, the world’s deepest draft yacht. It draws 33 feet. Her first newsworthy act after a gala launching was to go hard aground on rocks off the coast of France.

After grinding away on the bottom for a while, the monster got off by raising her lifting keel, which must been have quite a production, as the keel bulb weighs 220,000 pounds. No word yet on what it cost to repair the highly engineered keel, but I suspect Mirabella can claim another world record.

Lifting keels are a fairly effective, if expensive, way of trying to avoid the inevitable, and they’re getting better all the time. The new 100-foot über-racer Maximus has a slick system in which the bottom portion of the keel slides virtually seamlessly into the top part. I hope it survives the first grounding of the 20-foot draft boat. You know it’s going to happen.