Finally got construction underway - its only taken me a year to get this far. Six months+ to design it, another 6 months to start building it. Made a lot of progress in the last couple of days now that the honey-do list has been worked down to a manageable state. It helped that I had all the components cut and ready to go. Fooled around with trying to lash it like I did on the last build, but got fed up with how long each lashing was taking and just epoxied the cross sections in place.

I'm still not sure I can actually get in it, will know for sure tomorrow when I remove the frame from the strong back. The top of the coaming is only 11" from the keel, 7" at the backrest - probably wouldn't be an issue if the coaming wasn't 16" x 20"! The contingency plan is to make a solid wood masik to replace the top half of the #3 cross section if I can't get into it. I mocked up the cockpit during the design phase, and by measurements I SHOULD be able to fit, but man it looks like a tight squeeze...

This is the kayak that started out as a 5' long 6x6 redwood beam, milled and scarfed into the necessary components. Everything except the epoxy and skin coating will be found/savaged/scrap material... Next time I build a kayak it will be from full length lumber. The scarfing has worked fine, it just took WAY too much time to cut and glue up the stringers - more time than its going to take to assemble the frame.