We focus on our lightweight and beautiful sailing canoe plans that you can easily build yourself using plywood and wood and even have amas to convert you canoe to a outrigger canoe. 4 Sailing Canoe Plans and an outrigger not ugly and definitely not even slightly slow.
5 Choices for Canoe Sailing
Simple box with classic good looks and Modern dinghy performance
Convert your Canoe, Kayak or Small Dinghy into a Sailboat.
Single partner supports both rig and leeboard.
When removed there is only the mast step left in the boat. Nothing else built in.
To give a canoe or narrow dinghy multihull performance
Everything light and removable.
Also to for diving or fishing
To give a canoe or kayak extra stability. Single crossbeam
They don’t touch the water most of the time so don’t change the speed or handling characteristics of the canoe
Ready for a gust or when reboarding from the water or when you just want to chill.
Sailing Canoe vs Sailing Dinghies
1/ Canoes are Inexpensive – less building materials for wood or plywood sailing canoe plan
A plywood sailing canoe, whether stitch and glue or strip plank will be half the weight of a sailing dinghy. The canoe comes out of 3 to 5 sheets of 4mm (5/32″) ply.
Or it should if properly designed!
Compared to my Goat Island Skiff design which is regarded as a very light sailing dinghy tops the scales at 130lbs In comparison a plywood sailing dinghy might come from 5 or 6 sheets of 6mm (1/4″) plywood sheets at around half that
Sailing Canoes have a advantage for Portability, storage and transport while still having performance much better than most sailing dinghies.
2/ Fast Plywood Sailing Canoes – Light and easy transportation and compact storage
Sailing Canoes leave plenty of space on the car roof even compared to a Laser.
My favourite designer, Phil Bolger said something like
There are two types of good boat
Those you live aboard, and …
… those you stick on your car roof to take home
Sailing dinghies are nice, but even scow moths which are tremendously light are hard to store and move around by yourself because of bulk and the wings have to be folded before they are safe to roofrack. My university days were always with a scow moth on my car roof. But I always needed help to move the boat from the car to the water.
Not so with a Canoe.
This is where Sailing Canoes excel. The smaller width allows them to be loaded and unloaded from a the cartop alone. A bit of length is useful as one end can be put down and the second end lifted off the car sideways.
Likewise, a reasonably light one can be at least a small distance.
When I was young (maybe 45!) I was able to put a 65 to 75 canoe on my shoulder and carry it to the water.
Now I can carry one some way on my knees.
A simple trolley that fits in the car allows very long portages when needed shown here on one of my Eureka Canoe designs. In dinghy sizes these become inconvenient to store, but at canoe widths of 3ft (900mm) or 40″ (a metre) not hard to put in the car at all.
3/ Light wind performance – Sailing Canoes Shine.
In RAID (long distance multi day sailing events) we have found that under sail that sailing canoes produce very high and very reliable speed averages.
Read how Joost ended up an hour ahead of the fleet in a major Netherlands event
The hint is that in any photos or videos they make very few waves and little fuss at low speed.
And those high average speeds are without paddling! Of course paddling means the canoe will be up around 6 to 8km/hr when the sailing dinghy is doing half that if paddle
In theory you can build a sailing dinghy with lots of sail and a planing hull, but what really happens?
The planing hull dinghy may (and only may) be faster in the gusts.
But in the lulls the high wetted surface area makes the dinghy sticky, where the canoe will keep moving at much higher speeds while barely disturbing the water surface.
4/ Sailing Canoes in strong winds have fewer handling vices than most sailing Dinghies
When I first started sailing canoes boat handling was a revelation.
Where a bit of heel starts a fight with the tiller to keep a sailing dinghy going straight the balanced volumes of the canoe ends means the boat just steers where you want to go.
See the faster sections of this Viola 14 Video. When the gust comes the crew doesn’t have to move back at all to keep the bow out and a bit of heel and the tiller doesn’t have to change angle.
Easy fast sailing with the boat doing most of the work. Calm and predictable.
Video image can take a moment to load.
Designing 4 sailing canoe plans and sailing regular canoes has taught me something about hull volumes – it puts a big handling question mark over boats with excessively wide sterns.
The lower drag also means that upwind you can reach Laser dinghy like speeds but definitely without the physical effort of sailing a Laser upwind in strong winds.
The reason? Waves don’t slow the slender canoe hull much, so you don’t need to get as much power as a blunt dinghy shape.
Our 4 sailing canoe plans in Plywood excel in Performance/Cost and Performance x Convenience
I love fast boats.
I love fast boats that are easy to get on my car roof even more.
Sailing canoes will go around a course with a Laser, or they will keep going when the bigger and heavier boats are having trouble.
The Viola sailing canoe is a very user friendly boat for teenagers through to experienced men and women sailors. It is stitch and glue construction.
Our Beth Sailing Canoe does require a bit more sailing knowledge because of the narrower beam and bigger sail. In average club racing she is handicapped around the Laser Radial or the OK Dinghy.
The Beth plywood sailing canoe is built from self made prefabricated panels.
This is a trait of very modern dinghy shapes such as the 49er. They might not have the absolute speed of a fat sterned I14 but they are more controllable than wide sterned variants of the i14., so it is possible to push them much much harder … and survive.
Lighter than a racing dinghy for transport.
Narrow for easy storage and carrying
Less hard work than most singlehanded boats
Predictable handling in strong winds
Devastating light wind distance performance
If you have sailing canoes and paddling canoes for every occasion then you may need a canoe storage rack.
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