Warren,

Don't let them fool you. Reading/plotting formers from a table of offsets is a pain in the a**. Nick's book is great at explaining it, but it is still a pain. Unless money is really tight I recommend buying the plans from Nick. (no I don't get a kickback)

Reading the table isn't terribly hard, it is just tremendously tedious and nit-picky work. If you have loads of time -- go for it. I did, and the boat came out great so it can be done by a first-timer. I wasn't working at the time though so money was in short supply and time was abundant. I'll buy plans for my next effort, a double for my wife and me.

I copied the table from the book into an Excel spreadsheet and then converted everything to straigtht Cartesian coordinates (x,y) with the origin at the centerline/waterline intersection. Then I copied everything to a CAD package and printed the formers out on a large-format plotter. All in all this took me about 12 to 15 hours of work to get right. The good news is that I can now reproduce it easily if I want to do another Guillemot.

Note that Nick has a few corrections/omissions for the Guillemot and one other boat (the double?) here on his web site.

Good luck whichever way you go. I'm sure you'll enjoy the building and paddling once you're done with the nasty up-front bits.

Randy