Review of Fatty Knees

Basic specs.

The Fatty Knees is a small sailing dinghy designed by the American maritime architect Lyle C. Hess in the early 2000.

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Hull

The hull is made of fibreglass. Generally, a hull made of fibreglass requires only a minimum of maintenance during the sailing season. And outside the sailing season, just bottom cleaning and perhaps anti-fouling painting once a year - a few hours of work, that's all.

Rig

The Fatty Knees is equipped with a cat rig. A cat rig (also called an una rig) is simple to manage as there is no standing rigging, often referred to as “unstayed”. With only one sail it can be single-handed quite easily. The downside is its upwind performance.

Keel

DaggerBoard aka Sword

The Fatty Knees is equipped with a daggerboard keel. A daggerboard is a lifting keel that can be lowered and raised, allowing the boat to enter shallow waters as well.

The boat can sail close to the beach as the draft is just 0.05 - 0.15 meter (0.16 - 0.46 ft) dependent of the load. See immersion rate below.

Sailing characteristics

This section covers widely used rules of thumb to describe the sailing characteristics. Please note that even though the calculations are correct, the interpretation of the results might not be valid for extreme boats.

Immersion rate

The immersion rate is defined as the weight required to sink the boat a certain level. The immersion rate for Fatty Knees is about 23 kg/cm, alternatively 133 lbs/inch.
Meaning: if you load 23 kg cargo on the boat then it will sink 1 cm. Alternatively, if you load 133 lbs cargo on the boat it will sink 1 inch.

Sailing statistics

This section is statistical comparison with similar boats of the same category. The basis of the following statistical computations is our unique database with more than 26,000 different boat types and 350,000 data points.

L/B (Length Beam Ratio)

What is L/B (Length Beam Ratio)?

The l/b ratio for Fatty Knees is 2.11.

Compared with other similar dinghies it is more spacy than 73% of all other designs. It seems that the designer has chosen a slightly more spacy hull design.

Maintenance

Boat owner's ideas

This section is reserved boat owner's modifications, improvements, etc. Here you might find (or contribute with) inspiration for your boat.

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Finally

We are always looking for new photos. If you can contribute with photos for Fatty Knees it would be a great help.

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References

[Ref 1]: ISO 8666 Small craft — Principal data.
[Ref 3]: ISO 12215-5 Small craft — Hull construction and scantlings.