My daughter has decided for her school's 8th grade Genius Hour Project to build herself a skin on frame kayak. Here's a little background, Genius Hour is a self guided project where students develop an idea for a project, come up with a timeline, list of materials, obtain funding and then execute it. Students have written their own gourmet recipes for cook books, designed and 3D printed remote control cars, and made princess birthday party kits for children's hospitals.

So far she's read Chris Cunningham's book a few times, watched tons of videos on youtube, oh yeah also carved out a pretty nice Greenland paddle for herself. We've started laying out the dimensions for the boat, but here's where we are running into trouble. We want to make the boat a little oversized so she'll have some room to grow. Her measurements dictate a 18" beam and 16'6" length. We've stretched the overall length out to 17ft and increased the beam to 20 inches, basically the same as Nick's Petral design. Our question is what do we do with the deck beam positions? Is it as simple as moving all of the beams forward of mid-ship an inch forward and everything aft backwards an inch?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Mark