: What a great picture! Do you mind if I use it as a screen saver?

Sure, why not? That'll be my bid for Immortality! (Or is that "Immorality"? )

:Is it hard to work the pump?

No. I do, unfortunately, need to move one knee away from the knee brace to pump, so I don't have quite as much boat control while pumping as I'd like. Not really enough room under the deck for me to shift my big feet onto the pump without rotating my knee closer to vertical. I can pump with the spray skirt in place. I haven't done a lot of testing yet, but it empties the cockpit after a no-skirt re-entry & roll in maybe 3 minutes while paddling.

: I'm torn between the simplicity of a canted forward bulkhead, with a spacer
: foam on it, and no foot braces, or the convenience of a foot pump.

My bulkhead is canted forward a little. You could certainly put the pump on a more dramatically angled bulkhead, or could use an angled bracket for the pump. If you used Pete Roszyk's lever-and-bungie system rather than the button, it might even work better on an angled bulkhead than on a square one.

The thick foam pads for my footrests are a little spongy when I'm pressing hard on them - I may replace them with wood blocks or some such with only an inch or so of foam. I may fill in more of the empty space with foam as well, to minimize floodable volume.

The cockpit is still very much a work in progress! Of course, who among us has a cockpit that couldn't use at least a LITTLE more tweaking?

I was going to start sanding the outside for varnish today, but realized I was out of sanding disks! Drat, another delay! Fortunately, there's good paddling year-round here in the SF area.