Design #541 COOKSON 50

50-footer with a canting keel. "This all started out as a fixed keel yacht with a trim tab," says Mick, "We basically took the Transpac 52 concept of a lighting fast 52 foot racer, shrunk it to 50ft, and increased the freeboard so it had some internal volume and felt like a 50-footer rather than a One-Tonner. We wanted something that would be reasonable to live aboard offshore and that you could also use to entertain your friends at the dock."

Having recently completed the Farr Open 60, Virbac, winner of it's first regatta, the double handed Transat Jacque Vabres, which was technically very complex and therefore expensive to build, much of his thinking has gone into getting the benefits of a canting keel, but containing the cost.

Having started with the fixed keel, trim tab idea, Cookson's thoughts ranged across to the radical end of the spectrum to an all-out machine with canting keel, free-standing rotating wing mast and so on. Then, the pendulum swung back towards the middle and Cookson settled on a more conservative go-fast boat, built in carbon and foam core, with a swept-spreader rig - a "nice yacht".

One of Cookson's major goals with the project is to provide a yacht that can be raced or cruised fast and safely by small crews, double-handed or even single-handed when the desire arises. With the rise in popularity of this kind of racing the fixed keel option looked less attractive. Crew costs are one of the major limiting factors according to many owners today. This boat will have the ability to sail with significantly less crew than other boats its size.

For these reasons, the idea of a canting keel kept tempting his imagination and he decided to have another