Making new keel shoes

Say what you like about the sailing performance of a fin-keeler, but for me and thousands of others the ability to take the ground aboard a twin-keeler, bilge-keeler, or whatever, is well worth any loss of potential speed. With one caveat: maybe it’s just me, but I sometimes seem to confuse the ability to take the ground with some sort of obligation to do so – as the many chips, gouges and scrapes along the bottom edges of my twin-keel Macwester Wight will attest.

The problem is that, apart from being unsightly, this sort of damage can lead to ingress of water. My boat has moulded fibreglass keels with a lump of cast iron on the forward end, put in place when the boat was built on wet polyester resin. The rest of the space is empty with the open top area in the boat covered in a thin layer of GRP.

If water can get in and get into contact with the ballast, then rust can occur which can ‘blow’ the gap between the GRP and the iron. This can