Red Fox review
Few boats have seen more reincarnations than an innovative 20-footer that first appeared 30 years ago. David Harding tells the Red Fox story
A design ahead of its time, we take a close look at this innovative 20-footer
If a prize were awarded to the boat that tried hardest to become established as a production cruiser over the course of three decades and deserved more success than it enjoyed, it would have to go to the Red Fox.
More precisely, it would go to the boat that started life as the Red Fox 200 before reappearing in many different guises, still bearing the Red Fox name at first before becoming the Hunter 20.
Back at the beginning of the 1990s, the well-known Hamble boatbuilder Hedley Bewes sketched out an idea for a trailerable cruiser to be built in plywood for home completion. In the words of Paul Boot, who later joined forces with Bewes to build production boats in glassfibre,
“Hedley’s idea was to start with a 25-footer and then get rid of all the bits you don’t need, like the angled stem, retroussé transom and flared topsides.”
At the time it was quite a radical approach, producing a boat that was extremely roomy for its length. Now it’s the norm: overhangs went out of fashion some time ago and chines – which were added as the design evolved – are de rigueur.
A more significant way in which she departed from convention was in the use of twin unballasted asymmetric daggerboards. Despite being conceived with trailing – and launching from her own trailer – very much in mind, the Red Fox was originally drawn with a fixed fin keel. When this was deemed impractical, it was time to think again.
Bewes made a half-model and asked David Thomas, with whom he’d worked over many years, to develop the idea and draw the lines. Thomas rejected what might have seemed the obvious alternative to a fin – a conventional lifting keel – because, as he put it, ‘they make such a mess of the middle of the boat.’
Many people have had to share a bunk with a cold lump of cast iron smelling of mud and seaweed, so Thomas had a better idea: twin asymmetric boards. With one each side, outboard of the accommodation, the cabin would be completely clear. The unballasted boards would be easy to raise and lower and, what’s more, they would give the boat a boost upwind because that’s what asymmetric boards do.
Thomas was well aware of Bruce King’s Terrorist, the 37-footer that used asymmetric boards to devastating effect in the 1974 One Ton Cup before a dismasting put her out of action.
The IOR (International Offshore Rule) was promptly changed to penalise multiple boards to the extent that no boat that used them could hope to be competitive. What happened in IOR circles had far-reaching effects on the development of yacht design in general. So, as far as asymmetric foils on monohulls in the public eye were concerned, that was that. They were seen as a whacky idea that didn’t work.
In fact the history of using multiple, movable appendages to improve upwind performance on monohulls goes back well over a century.
Multihulls, widely regarded as being on the fringes of acceptability until relatively recently, had also quietly been using asymmetric boards for decades before most people got to hear about them. And dinghies such as the 505 have a long association with gybing centreboards (boards that pivot about the centreline), so the idea of using asymmetry to generate lift from foils was nothing new even 30 years ago. It just hadn’t entered the mainstream.
The problem facing the Red Fox when she was launched was that the boat-buying public didn’t understand asymmetric boards and weren’t keen on the idea of ‘tacking’ them when they went about.
Changing tacks
Asymmetric boards are like a conventional keel that has been sliced in half down the centreline. The left-hand slice goes on the starboard side of the boat, so the curved side is facing inboard and the flat side outboard. The right-hand slice goes on the port side of the boat. You sail with the leeward board down, because it’s the curved side that generates lift. Before tacking, you lower the windward board, then go about and raise the old leeward (now windward) one. We were all watching that happening on the AC 75s as they flew around the Hauraki Gulf on their foils in the recent America’s Cup.
Once the idea of a ballasted keel had been rejected for the Red Fox, Thomas had to tweak the lines of the hull to give it more form stability since all the ballast would be internal. That’s where the flat bottom and pronounced chine came in. These changes increased the wetted area and resulted in a design that was perhaps a little more boxy than the one he’d started with. On the other hand it provided a lot of space for a 20-footer and the asymmetric foils made sure the boat sailed pretty well.
She wasn’t a spectacular performer, being first and foremost a family cruiser, but she saw off Sonatas on the race course from time to time. That wasn’t bad for a trailable 20-footer with four berths, a galley and a separate heads compartment.
My first encounter with an ‘official’ Red Fox (I’d already sailed a modified version, of which more later) was in 1998. The 200E, which succeeded the original 200, had been out for several years by then and found some very enthusiastic owners. Some had trailed their boats across Europe and others had sailed across
‘Asymmetric foils were seen as a whacky idea that didn’t work’
the North Sea more than once, proving the versatility and seakeeping qualities of this capable and roomy little ship.
The problem was that, for all the owners’ enthusiasm, there weren’t enough of them. So, in 1998, the builders introduced the Red Fox 200S alongside the 200E. A lot of people didn’t need so much accommodation, principally wanting a daysailer-cum-weekender, so the 200S was given a much longer cockpit and shorter cabin with a low-profile blister coachroof. Freeboard was reduced by 7.5cm (3in) to make her sleeker and lighter and she came with the option of twin rudders.
Sailing the two boats side by side, and hopping from one to the other, I did find the 200S slightly quicker and notably more sprightly than her cruisier sister. She also had the advantage of a cockpit that could comfortably accommodate half-a-dozen people even with the outboard engine in its inboard well taking up several feet at the aft end.
What you want when sailing a Red Fox is to find a comparable boat to pace yourself against upwind in order to gauge the effectiveness of the asymmetric boards. Spotting a 22ft Mini Tonner close by, we set ourselves up on its windward quarter. In the light winds we experienced to start with – barely 6 knots – we couldn’t match it. When the breeze picked up to around 12 knots, however, we simply walked upwind and gained 50 yards to weather in about 10 minutes. It was a spectacular demonstration of what the boards could do.
The most important point was to accept that the boat had to be sailed deep enough to generate speed and therefore the necessary water-flow over the boards: trying to match the other boat’s pointing would not work. Despite your lower heading with asymmetrics, your VMG (velocity made good) to windward will be appreciably greater once you’re moving fast enough for them to start working. Don’t worry about where you’re pointing: think about where you’re going.
At this stage I should say that the boards on the Red Fox were compromised because of the nature of the boat, and David Thomas acknowledged that. We will discuss this later, but in essence their design meant that they weren’t particularly efficient in light winds.
Thinking simple
Introducing the 200S was a logical move, but sadly it wasn’t enough. Red Fox was bought by Select Yachts in 2003 along with Hunter Boats.
Hunter decided that the asymmetric boards had had a fair run. What they wanted was a small twin-keeler as a starter boat, because their own 21-footer had been discontinued by then and they reckoned there was a demand for a shallow-draught cruiser that could sit on a drying mooring like the twin-keelers of yesteryear.
‘Don’t worry about where you’re pointing, think about where you’re going’ ’
The Red Fox 200T (T for twins) would fill the gap left by their own 21 and by boats such as the Prelude, Westerly Warwick, Hurley 22 and others.
The question to me was how the Red Fox would fare without her ‘secret weapons’. I had no need to worry: we went out into 25 knots of south-easterly against an ebb tide at the mouth of Southampton Water and the boat loved it. She punched upwind at 4.6-4.8 knots, didn’t appear to make excessive leeway (we had no boats to pace ourselves against this time) and hit double-figure speeds downwind. No twin-keeler I had sailed had ever surfed away like this. As David Thomas put it, ‘she has a perfect surfboard bottom’. Even in flat water we clocked 7 knots downwind. The biggest constraint was the shallow rudder, needed because of the shallow keels that gave a draught of just 0.69m (2ft 3in). It would lose grip if we pushed too hard.
When I next met the Red Fox, in 2007, she had been given a new name: Hunter 20. Her builders had decided to offer an additional version by combining the twin keels with the large cockpit of the Red Fox 200S to create the Hunter 20 Sport, complete with asymmetric spinnaker. We had a good blast around the Carrick Roads on a day with a fistful of wind and, as you would expect, the boat performed well
– shallow rudder notwithstanding.
A few years later, the
RIGHT Once the inboard well was blanked off, as here on the Hunter 20 Sport LF, the outboard was mounted on the transom
Hunter range moved to Lauren Marine in Southampton. Lauren’s Danny Wheeler built his first boat with the deck and reduced freeboard of the sport version but this time with a single, unballasted daggerboard. I tested the Hunter 20 Sport LF (lifting fin) in 2010 and liked the simplicity, even if there was scope for refinement in one or two areas. Danny followed this with the Hunter 20 Cruiser – a full-cabin version that, like the Sport, was offered with twin keels, twin asymmetric boards or a single daggerboard. Whatever combination of cabin and keel(s) you wanted, you could have.
As I had back in 1998, we sailed two boats together to see how they compared; this
time the Sport LF and the Cruiser. Not surprisingly, the Sport had the edge.
Unexplored potential
Much as I liked the Red Fox and Hunter 20 in all their varied forms, I always felt that their performance potential had never been fully realised. I concluded my 2011 test of the Cruiser by saying ‘if someone were brave enough to order a Sport version with asymmetrics, a taller rig and a few go-faster goodies, he could have a seriously potent little pocket rocket’.
Strangely enough, that’s what happened the following year: someone ordered a Sport version complete with asymmetric boards, an asymmetric spinnaker, upgraded hardware, a larger jib and a heavily roached mainsail. All he didn’t do was increase the height of the mast, which was a shame in a way because I always felt (despite David Thomas’s assertions to the contrary) that the boat could use appreciably more sail area. When it came to performance, this was as good as it got.
And for the third time I was able to sail two boats together to compare them. This time we paced the Sport Asymmetric, as it was appropriately dubbed, against the Sport LF, the Asymmetric doing what it should as soon as the breeze picked up.
Sadly, too few people were prepared to follow this owner’s lead and buy either this most potent of the Sports versions or any other Hunter 20. So, just as it was after Terrorist dared to venture where no boat had ventured before in IOR circles, that was that.
I’d sailed seven variants of the Red Fox/ Hunter 20 over 14 years, got to know the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the basic design, and was disappointed that this thoroughly likeable little boat didn’t meet with more success.
Strictly speaking I should say that I sailed eight variants rather than seven because, in 1996, I’d had a spin in a boat called Anarchist that a free-thinking designer called Chris Freer had built based on the hull of an original Red Fox. Freer extended the stern by a couple of feet, fitted the modified deck of a quarter tonner, added a bigger rig and modified the boards. The Red Fox’s boards were mounted well outboard to avoid intrusion into the cabin. They were shallow to keep the top below boom height when they were raised, and they were mounted vertically. Freer used a different NACA section, set them further inboard and made them deeper to increase the lateral area and to give them a higher aspect ratio: he calculated that 5:1 was 25% more
‘Freer was well aware of what an effective weapon asymmetric boards could be’
efficient than 3:1 in terms of lift. He canted them outboard so the leeward board came vertical as the boat heeled and, as the angle pointed them at the spreader roots, he devised a system whereby one board was automatically raised as the other was lowered (though they could also be raised together).
He used them to good effect on the race course, finding that, apart from the established boost to windward, the lift from the leeward board allowed him to carry the spinnaker on shier reaches because he could point below the layline and still make the mark. He lowered the windward board on downwind legs in light airs to soak down to the mark, and so on: there were all sorts of opportunities.
Having been at the One Ton Cup in 1974 and seen Terrorist’s performance at first hand, Freer was well aware of what an effective weapon asymmetric boards could be.
PBO’s verdict
The Red Fox, Anarchist and the Hunter 20 combined ideas that were very, very good and undoubtedly ahead of their time. It’s such a pity that none of the many versions lived up to its promise in commercial terms at least, though the owners generally love their boats and it’s easy to see why.
What else might you buy?
British-built alternatives include the cabin version of the Hawk 20 and the BayCruiser/BayRaider 20.
From across the Channel, Jeanneau’s Sun 2000 is a contender alongside the Beneteau First 210/211/20/20.7 (another boat with a hull that has had many lives).
Otherwise you have a choice of older lift-keelers or twin-keelers such as Hunter’s Medina 20/Hunter 21.