: I am about to start my first boat and have choosen the Guillemot. The
: material I will be using is primarily Western Red Cedar but the thickness
: of the boards I have access to is 11/16" thick rather than 3/4".
: Is this too thin?

I have a lot of old tongue-and-groove board which is WRC, and is 5/8"
thick - its fine for boat building. My first boat, Geyrfugl, was built
entirely from wood this thick (I chose some 5/8" spruce to go with the
cedar, and had a small amount of mahongany which also happened to be the
same thickmess). The deck of my hybrid Cormorant also used quite a lot of
the same Red Cedar boards, and also a lot of purpleheart, which came in
1 inch boards. For a lot of the deck, 1" strips just wouldn't do, so a lot
of the stripping was done by halving that - allowing for bandsaw kerf, that's
under a half inch.

I have to say that Geyrfugl was built to exactly 5/6 of Nick's design size,
to suit a very small paddler. So having strips precisely 5/6 of the "normal"
width was good, even if it was purely the result of the availability of free
timber :-)

: If I want to use the bead and cove method for my strips
: will I be losing a significant amount of the "width" of my
: already thin strips in the milling process?

Its true - cove-and-beading will lose a greater proportion of narrower
strips. I haven't used cove and bead, I just plane a bevel to each strip.
Since narrower strips have less angle between each strip, you lose a bit
less of the width of each strip, so the proportion that is wasted is
pretty much independent of strip width.

Geyrfugl is a Great Auk - there is no curve on the deck except for
the angle at the ridge, so non-cove-and-bead strips made perfect sense.
The deck of the Cormorant has a curve, so cove-and-bead might have made it
easier, if I had the technology to mill them. The deck was lofted as a
half-ellipse of two different eccentricities fore and aft. This made for
tighter curves near the sheer, so narrow strips were a great boon here.

Cheers, Andy