[Jeff_H]

To some extent the choice of a keel comes down to your own specific goals, prejudices, and fears. The basic physics make it harder to engineer a fin keel to withstand a major impact. It is a simple product of the longer lever arm of the fin vs the smaller lever arm of the fin attachement. That is not to say that a fin keel cannot be made strong enough to withstand anything that you are likely to hit, just that it is harder to do. Since most fin keel boats are designed to meet the higher performance requirements of a coastal cruiser, most fin keels are not engineered around the severe loads that are implied in a really hard grounding or a collision with a shipping container. So while fin keels can be as strong and safe in an impact as their longer keeled sisters, they generally aren''t.

That said, few full keeled boats are either. Today, most full keeled fiberglass boats use encapsulated keels. While encapsulated keels are cheaper to build, they are generally much more vulnerable to a sinking in a hard grounding or collision with that immoveable objects. In most cases, the ballast becomes the immovable object when the rock collides with the boat, allowing the skin to be ruptured at the point of collision and the ballast to be driven up through the comparatively thin membrane that occurs over the top of the keel on most full keel boats. We had that happen to a Pearson that my family owned years ago.

When you ask,"how would these 2 types of keel designs comparatively fare in the worst of storms.....would it make much of a difference?" that question is too simplistic. Boats are a system. They survive heavy storms or not, they are comfortable in a blow or not, not only because of their keel types but because of a wide range of other factors that are more significant and to a great extent related to weight, windage, foil, and buoyancy distribution, and robustness. neither a full keel or a fin keel has an inherent advanatage in heavy going. Many of the notable attributes attributed to full keels come from factors that have less than zero relationship to whether the boat has a fin or a full keel.

In the end it comes down to the specifics of the particular design and its engineering. It also comes down to the boat''s proposed use which can greatly shift the priority for one particular trait over another.

Jeff