Beetle Cat Boats

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Photo by: Billy Black

Racing has been part of the Cape Cod catboat’s life since the beginning. The late Howard I. Chapelle in his book American Small Sailing Craft (W.W. Norton & Co. Inc.) writes: “ … the crews of the boats consisted of no more than two men, and the boats were raced to market. In other words, shoal draft, speed, seaworthiness, weatherliness, handiness … were necessary features of design.” Later in the chapter, he tells us that racing, which caused the rigs to grow in size and the boats to become truculent, compromised the catboat’s wholesomeness, tarnishing its reputation. The Beetle Cat’s reputation isn’t in any danger of being sullied, because John Beetle designed it to be as well balanced and safe as the type permits.

Some sources reckon that more than 4,000 Beetle Cats populate the world and that most of them live along the East Coast from Maine to New Jersey. I seldom argue with “sources,” and I’ve seen enough of these charming 12-footers during my travels to accept the veracity of this figure. Every time I see a Beetle Cat under sail or dancing around its mooring ball, I want one. They are downright lovable — the plumb stem and proud bow like the “pug-nosed dream” in the tune “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” Sailing one simply increases my desire.



Bill Womack (above), the 68-year-old CEO of Beetle Inc. and an energetic fireplug of a man, treated me to my second sail aboard a Beetle, this time on Buzzards Bay off Wareham, Massachusetts. Very light air, the occasional sprinkle of rain and the threat of a thunderstorm from the west urged us to abandon the outing, but the occasional puff teased us into chasing every patch of cat’s paws we saw. In spite of its two-to-one beam/length ratio, the Beetle Cat doesn’t have very much wetted surface area relative to the power of its 100-square-foot gaff sail. The Beetle ghosted along rather nicely, another characteristic that endeared catboats to the working watermen of Cape Cod before the advent of small internal combustion engines.

Beetle Inc., now located in an industrial park in Wareham rather than the waterfront, is the fourth incarnation of the company. John Beetle died in 1928, leaving his daughter, Ruth, to assume management of the Beetle Boat Co. She oversaw the company’s transition from building whaleboats to Beetle Cats, which continued until World War II interrupted production. After the war, Ruth’s brother, Carl, became interested in the development of fiber-reinforced plastic as a boatbuilding material, and he transferred the rights and title of the catboat to the Concordia Co. of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts — ushering in the era of Leo J. Telesmanick, the legendary craftsman who ran the Beetle shop at Concordia.



Although the Concordia Co. changed hands twice during Telesmanick’s tenure, which lasted until 1983, the Beetle Cat division remained part of the package until Charlie York bought it in 1993. He ran the operation until 2003 but couldn’t keep up with the demand for new boats, off-season storage and repairs. That’s when Womack bought Beetle Inc.