the other wierd thing is JUST after the cheater in the bow/stern issue, the whole situation reverses.
ben's yak is a great illustration. now the bow or stern is already closed, but the midarea still has 12 +/- strips to go to close. conceptually all these strips will be almost reverse cheaters. like they truly could be skinnied way down at the bow/stern and left wide at the mid area and with a little care the effect would be to accentuate the long yak lines rather than slightly truncate them as most strippers do at the bottom of the yaks.

and in some strippers(i/ve seen in both canoes or yaks), people actually change their stripping pattern in order to simplify these new tight curvatures at the bottom, when the concept of just using a reverse cheater or so will bring things back to achievability. and with a little prefitting or preplanning it'd be even better.

of course there are an infinite variety of reasons why anything i've said here could be modified or contradicted, but in the absence of a good reasons, this would be another way to1/keep the strip pattern continuing where the shape is continuing 2/make construction easier 3/make curvatures less 4/resolve the curving lines into more linear where the body of the yak is more linear.

-mick

ps - i used the reverse approach on my yak(its a different type) bottom, but did it for every strip so the lines would flow to my liking. the upside is that it resolves to parallel strips at the bottom. the downside is more work.

why is there ALWAYS downside??