Review of Kelt 5.50

Basic specs.

The Kelt 5.50 is a small sailboat designed by the French maritime architect Gilles Ollier in the early eighties. The Kelt 5.50 is built by the French yard Kelt Marine Inc..

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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 boat equipped with a fractional rig. A fractional rig has smaller headsails which make tacking easier, which is an advantage for cruisers and racers, of course. The downside is that having the wind from behind often requires a genaker or a spinnaker for optimal speed.

Keel

The Kelt 5.50 is equipped with a fin keel. The fin keel is the most common keel and provides splendid manoeuvrability. The downside is that it has less directional stability than a long keel.

The boat can enter even shallow marinas as the draft is just about 0.98 - 1.08 meter (3.22 - 3.52 ft) dependent on 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 Kelt 5.50 is about 84 kg/cm, alternatively 474 lbs/inch.
Meaning: if you load 84 kg cargo on the boat then it will sink 1 cm. Alternatively, if you load 474 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 Kelt 5.50 is 2.33.

Compared with other similar sailboats it is more spacy than 86% of all other designs. It seems that the designer has chosen a significantly more spacy hull design.

Maintenance

Rig

If you need to renew parts of your running rig and is not quite sure of the dimensions, you may find the estimates computed below useful.

**Guiding dimensions of running rig**
Usage	Length		Diameter
Jib sheet	5.4 m	(17.8 feet)	8 mm	(5/16 inch)
Genoa sheet	5.4 m	(17.8 feet)	8 mm	(5/16 inch)
Mainsheet	13.6 m	(44.5 feet)	8 mm	(5/16 inch)
Spinnaker sheet	11.9 m	(39.2 feet)	8 mm	(5/16 inch)

Boat owner's ideas

This section shown boat owner's changes, improvements, etc. Here you might find inspiration for your boat.

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Finally

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References

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