Easter 2007. A long weekend at our family place in Wales and I was determined that I'd get afloat.

Deck is now glassed and on. If you look carefully you'll see that in the end I didn't do the deck and the deck to hull joint wih a single piece of fibreglass, I used a separate tape for the seam. So I could have taken the deck off after glassing the top and made the Maroke fittings in place. Oh well.

Note the white-ish colour on the deck - that's the blush on the epoxy. It took some serious cleaning of later when I came to vanishing.

Nice weather and a chance to work outside - bliss after the cramped garage.

I've seen various comments about the difficulty of lining up deck and hull, and how to hold them in place. I understand the problem for strip built kayaks, but for stitch and glue like this I just used exactly the same technique as for all other seams: stitch, epoxy between the stitches, remove stitches, fill the whole seam with epoxy filler, sand smooth.

Lots of progress has been made by this picture.

• The front hatch lip is made and just waiting a sealing strip in the channel.
• The wooden screw in day hatch has been made and is also just waiting its sealing strip.
• The rear hatch is still a hole in the deck - although the hatch lip has actually been made off the kayak and is waiting to be glued in place.
• The cockpit coaming upstand has been fitted.

More on hatches and the cockpit coaming coming up...