Beth Sailing Canoe

Product Description

Beth is a lightweight sharpie canoe yawl combining a traditional lug yawl rig with a high speed canoe hull.

She has accompanied me on most of my holidays, used mostly for daysailing with occasional fun racing thrown in. Beth is the first thing unloaded at a holiday destination and last packed when leaving. She always draws a lot of interest from other sailors particularly when they realise her speed is well beyond that of other ‘antique’ boats.

Michael Storer, Designer

Inspired by racing canoes of the late nineteenth century, Michael Storer designed this high performance lug yawl sailing canoe with a simplified square hull shape and a large sail area. The rig is traditional looking but set up using modern sail controls and fitted to a hull with high speed potential. The rig is particularly forgiving when gybing in strong breezes. This sailing canoe is fast, performing similarly to a Laser dinghy, and only recommended for people with a reasonable background in competitive dinghy sailing. You need the skills to handle this fast, light and responsive boat. For people that don't quite have that level of skill but live in an area with predominantly light winds, then she would make a great light weather, sunny day boat. For those not used to handling a boat with this type of rig, notes on sailing are included with the plans.

The decks are conventional, making buoyant tanks fore and aft. There is a central daggerboard and steering is by a rudder suspended from the stern.

The hull is made from three sheets of 4 mm okoume plywood and two sheets of 6 mm okoume plywood (plus some solid wood).

Plans

The 90-page A4 plans for the Beth sailing canoe are more like a book or a boat building course. They contain detailed information on each building step, including how to join the plywood, mark the shapes of the panels and use the epoxy.

The plans are highly detailed and fully dimensioned. That means that there is no poring over them with your scale rule and getting scale conversions wrong: the measurements you need to know are written in clear type and in the area that you are looking at. Lofting information for making wooden spars is also included as are the sail plans.

PDF Plans

An electronic version of the plans in PDF format that can be viewed using Adobe Reader. After credit card authorisation the file will be sent to the email address put on the order form.