: And if you want to mess with me about ugly black rubba bubba hatches on a
: wood boat, please reconsider. I would much rather you took me out with one
: clean head shot instead if it isn't asking too much.

They look fine. One proviso though - the hatch covers gradually perish.
I have the impression that the VCP ones are shorter-lived than the
Kajak-sport ones. I have a 19cm VCP hatch on the foredeck and a tiny
KS one above the skeg box aft. The VCP one is looking quite cracked
after six years, and the boat is stored away from the light. The KS one
still looks fine. That's an additional maintenance expense to take into
account. Building the recesses was easy peasy - just cut a hole, epoxy
in a plywood annulus, and add walls from short lengths of strip orientated
vertically as for a Schade-style cockpit coaming. Sand, fillet, glass, fix
the hatch rim with both epoxy and brass or S/S bolts, but (important!)
shorten the bolts so they end up almost flush, and cover what protrudes
with dookie so there are no edges/projections to tear your drybags on
when over-zealously packing or unpacking the boat.

I made my recesses quite shallow, so I glued the ply annulus directly
into the deck hole. You could, with a bit more effort, recess them a bit
more, but you would really want a scupper so the hatch rim didn't sit in
water. On my aft hatch this isn't an issue, but forward, my hatch does
stick up enough to turn a wave breaking over the foredeck into spray
which arrives at face level ...

I did a retrofit hatch like this for an old fibreglass Anas acuta, and
it is definitely a lot harder to get a neat job if you don't have easy
access to the underside of the deck.

The pic shows the tiny aft hatch, deck is purpleheart, recess walls are
padauk. The rim and cover were just resting loosely in place at this point
which is obviously before glassing. Eventually the tiny hatch was just
epoxied - only the big one was bolted, but then the big one takes more abuse.