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.
The standard boat dimensions
| i | - |
|---|---|
| j | - |
| p | - |
| e | - |
| p2 | - |
| e2 | - |
| i2 | - |
| j2 | - |
| I | J | P | E | P2 | E2 | I2 | J2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
Blueprints
Sails
| Sail Type | GAFF MAIN |
|---|---|
| Luff | 6.01 ft - (1832 mm) |
| Foot | 7.87 ft - (2399 mm) |
| Leech | 13.59 ft - (4142 mm) |
| Tack Angle | * 19.9 ° |
| Diag (clew/throat) | 9.9 ft - (3018 mm) |
| Head | 8.39 ft - (2557 mm) |
| Area | * 64.98 ft² |
| Sail Type | GAFF MIZZEN |
|---|---|
| Luff | 3.05 ft - (930 mm) |
| Foot | 4.3 ft - (1311 mm) |
| Leech | 6.09 ft - (1856 mm) |
| Head | * 85.88 ft - (26176 mm) |
| Diag (clew/throat) | 5.09 ft - (1551 mm) |
| Tack Angle | 3.9 ° |
| Area | * 16.41 ft² |
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.