The Quick Red Fox
If a prize were awarded to the boat that tried hardest to become established as a production cruiser over the course of three decades and deserved more success than it enjoyed, it would have to go to the Red Fox.
More precisely, it would go to the boat that started life as the Red Fox 200 before reappearing in many different guises, still bearing the Red Fox name at first before becoming the Hunter 20.
Back at the beginning of the 1990s, the well-known Hamble boatbuilder Hedley Bewes sketched out an idea for a trailerable cruiser to be built in plywood for home completion. In the words of Paul Boot, who later joined forces with Bewes to build production boats in glassfibre, “Hedley’s idea was to start with a 25-footer and then get rid of all the bits you don’t need, like the angled stem, retroussé transom and flared topsides.”
At the time it was quite a radical approach, producing a boat that was extremely roomy for its length. Now it’s the norm: overhangs went out of fashion some time ago and chines – which were added as the design evolved – are de rigueur.
A more significant way in which she departed from convention was in the use of twin unballasted asymmetric daggerboards. Despite being conceived with trailing – and launching from her own trailer – very much in mind, the Red Fox was originally drawn with a fixed fin keel. When this
