K-6 spans dinghy/yacht divide

Interest in the new RS racing keelboat is coming from some unexpected corners, Andy Rice reports

Martin Wadhams is used to seeing his new RS boats succeed. Since arriving on the high performance dinghy scene in the mid-Nineties with the RS400 and 600, Wadhams and co-director Nick Peters have scored a number of notable successes in a market that they clearly understand.

But when it came to launching a keelboat, the K-6, at the London Boat Show, this represented a bit of a step into the unknown. Its most obvious market would be the people already racing small keelboats like the Flying Fifteen or the Squib, but Wadhams told madforsailing that its appeal seems to have gone much further than that.

"It seems to appeal to three distinct groups: the people already sailing Fifteens or Squibs, the performance dinghy sailor who wants to make the move up to a keelboat, but also sailors of bigger boats who want to step down the range."
It is this latter category that has surprised Wadhams the most. "The K-6 appears to be attracting sports boat sailors who are sick of trying to get five people together each weekend for racing. It offers them the excitement without the hassle."

The other thing the K-6 has done is offer a manufacturer’s one-design option in an arena that has been dominated by ‘open’ one-designs like the Flying Fifteen and Squib. Before the dinghy revolution of the early nineties, the Fireball, 505 and International 14 dominated the racing scene. Whichever class you chose, winning was as much about selecting the right hull, mast and sails as it was about sheer sailing skill.

Then in 1993 Topper’s Iso and the Laser 5000 arrived on the scene, rapidly followed by the RS range and a further succession of products from Laser and Topper. This transformed the way people went high-performance sailing - you could buy a completely competitive product in these new classes straight off the shelf.

The same one-design revolution has taken the big boat world by storm, most notably with the Farr 40 and Mumm 30, and slightly further down the range, the Melges 24, Hunter 707 and Cork 1720. But no one has successfully taken that one-design concept into the small keelboat market - so can RS?

Wadhams says the one-design concept is more appealing than ever in a world where most us are short on time. "A lot of guys like the idea of filling out an order form, paying their money, and being ready to race - and be competitive."

The added bonus of the K-6 is that it will be more forgiving on poor boathandling than most of the new dinghy designs. "If you make a big mistake, you won't fall in, so you might lose a few boatlengths but you'll still be in the race and in with a chance," he says.

One of the comments that people sailing the boat have made is that you can let it heel drastically and its tendency to broach is minimal - the boat keeps on tracking in a straight line. Wadhams explains: "It's narrow on the waterline, and all the diagonals are very straight, which is what gives it this forgiving characteristic." Yacht designer Paul Handley drew the lines, and Rondar boatbuilder Paul Young had a strong input on the design as well as the construction method.

Wadhams continues: "Being narrow means the boat is more tender and can't carry as much sail area as other similar-sized boats, and certainly you wouldn't have this shape for a cruising boat because there's not much interior space having a narrow hull.

"But I'm told the new IRM boats are going this way, getting narrower. It means you lose righting moment, but that is offset by the reduced drag of the narrow hull form."

With a maximum crew weight of 200 kg, the boat will end up being sailed either two- or three-up. Wadhams believes the majority will sail two-up. "The keelboat sailor tends to be a little older than the dinghy sailor, and we all get heavier as we get older, so I think two-up will be the norm. But then we thought it would be 60:40 in favour of twin trapezing on the RS800 after a year, and yet we're looking at pretty much everyone on twin trapeze, so it shows how accurate my predictions are," he says.

It will be interesting to watch the progress of the K-6 and see if it achieves the same level of success as its dinghy cousins in the RS range. And if recent trends are anything to go by, we can expect a spate of copy-cat keelboats to hit the water a year from now.