I've only done one strip kayak, and I hand-planed my strips. This was mostly due to the fact that I did my stripcutting elsewhere and built the kayak in my apartment -- time and tools were limited for making the strips. Hand-planing took a longer time, but it worked nicely. It took me a good 350 hours to build my kayak, but the simple process of hand-planing the strips while sipping a hard cider and listening to jazz on a winter evening was almost zen-like. You'll find that there are a good mixture of bead/cove advocates and hand-plane advocates here on this board and you'll have made the right decision either way.

It appears you are considering building a canoe, and I wonder if bead and cove would be slightly better for you, though. In a canoe both sides of the hull are visible. When hand-planing my strips, I could over-bevel them slightly so that there was a slight gap on the inside, but looked great on the outside. In your case if it weren't perfectly beveled, it might not look as good -- but that depends on the eye of the beholder. If you're looking for a functional boat which is pretty but not furniture quality, a little gap here or there may not be of much concern.

One other idea suggested by Jay Babina for his Outer Island kayak that I built was to pre-bevel the edge of each strip on a table saw to 11 degrees. This eliminates hand-bevelling, but leaves the inside over-beveled, so gaps on the inside will be seen. But of course that was for a kayak which isn't seen much on the inside.

Dean