Beth Sailing Canoe
Description
The Beth Sailing Canoe is a high-performance, lightweight plywood sailing canoe designed by Australian naval architect Michael Storer in the early 1990s. Inspired by 19th-century racing canoes (e.g., those of Dixon Kemp and Paul Butler), it blends traditional aesthetics with modern simplicity and speed, earning the nickname "kamikaze canoe" for its exhilarating downwind performance. Designed as a test bed for low-stretch rigging (e.g., Kevlar) on lug sails, Beth is a solo or duo craft optimized for exciting sailing on lakes, rivers, or calm coastal waters—capable of outpacing Lasers on broad reaches while being easy to build and cartop. It's a plywood "square boat" (flat-bottomed hull) that's fast to assemble (80–120 hours for intermediates) using stitch-and-glue methods, with full-size patterns and a 90-page "book-like" manual. No production fiberglass versions exist; it's a DIY favorite for enthusiasts seeking classic looks with contemporary handling. Beth has been featured in Storer's plans catalog and videos showing it soaring in strong winds.
Construction Details
| Designer | Michael Storer Design |
|---|---|
| Length | 16.000 ft |
| LOA | 15.500 ft |
| Beam | 2.670 ft |
| Displacement | 70 lb |
The standard boat dimensions
| i | - |
|---|---|
| j | - |
| p | - |
| e | - |
| p2 | - |
| e2 | - |
| i2 | - |
| j2 | - |
| I | J | P | E | P2 | E2 | I2 | J2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
Blueprints
Sails
Beth Sailing Canoe - 4-SIDED SAIL
| Luff | 6.02 ft - (1835 mm) |
|---|---|
| Foot | 7.87 ft - (2399 mm) |
| Leech | 13.6 ft - (4145 mm) |
| Head | 8.4 ft - (2560 mm) |
| Diagonal | 9.9 ft - (3018 mm) |
| Tack Angle | 89.9 ° |
| Area | 65.07 ft² |
| Comments | Balanced lug main, two full battens, with reefs at the batten positions. |
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Beth Sailing Canoe - 4-SIDED SAIL
| Luff | 3.05 ft - (930 mm) |
|---|---|
| Foot | 4.3 ft - (1311 mm) |
| Leech | 6.1 ft - (1859 mm) |
| Head | 3.9 ft - (1189 mm) |
| Diagonal | 5.1 ft - (1554 mm) |
| Tack Angle | 86.1 ° |
| Area | 16.44 ft² |
| Comments | Lug mizzen, one full length batten with a reef at the batten position. |
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Disclaimer. Boats are not all the same -- even when produced in the same factory of the same model. Sailrite does its best to publish accurate dimensions, but we often find it worthwhile to have our customers measure their boats carefully before we produce kits for them. You should take the same precautions, especially when the data is not from Sailrite. The information on this site is not guaranteed to be accurate. Sailrite offers this content as a service to our community, but takes no responsibility for the reliability of the data provided.
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