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Owning a boat that can float in knee-deep water opens up all sorts of possibilities. Whether that matters to you depends on the sort of sailing you do, but for some people it’s fundamental.
In fact, shallow draught is so fundamental to so many that some boatbuilders, such as Parker, Southerly, Alubat (with the Ovni range) and Allures built (or have built) their names and reputations on the ability of their boats to go where few others can.
In the case of Southerly, for a long time their ‘wedge-of-cheese’ keels and shallow single rudders meant compromises in performance, so they mostly found favour among cruising folk who were prepared to trade speed, power and pointing for creek-crawling convenience.
Then all that began to change, to the point where the latest generation of Southerlys, designed by Ed Dubois, Rob Humphreys and Stephen Jones, were true performance cruisers that could more than hold their own against many fin-keelers while still allowing their owners to nudge the bow into the beach and wade ashore.
