I beg to differ, but I can see how such a view could take hold and how it would be of some relief to boat builders that it be allowed to.
I’m certainly not a yacht designer so I can only speculate that bolt on appendages are favoured because it’s cheap to build that way and it allows more varied keel configurations to be used, designs that would be impossible to accommodate with an encapsulated ballast keel. And it allows the contact area between hull and keel to be minimised and streamlined – this is apparently a good thing when trying to design a faster boat. I suppose that’s why we see keels dropping off, and not just from high tech racing boats; even if the design is technically correct there must surely be less room for error in manufacturing to the required tolerances.
I once bounced a fin keeled Jeanneau Symphonie off the hard packed bottom of Galveston Bay. Not deliberately; I was caught by the tsunami-like bow wave of the tanker I’d just crossed the Houston ship channel in front of. A day or so later I found that water was trickling in from a crack alongside the keel – when I waggled the saloon table pedestal I could increase the flow! The repair was time consuming and costly.
So, whereas I don’t suggest that bolted on keels are unsuitable for cruising, far from it, I do think a cruising boat should be able to take the ground, deliberately or accidentally, without major structural damage.
