Using bead and cove strips, I found that it was actually easier to use two short strips, joined somewhere in the middle, rather than full length strips. To fit a strip into the "weave" you have to make a diagonal cut that matches the previous strips, then round off the cut - make a bead - which matches the cove of the previous strips. It's tricky. I got better at it as I went along, but it still took a lot of adjusting. Sometimes I got the angle just right on the first try, and the hand-filed bead just fit the adjacent cove. Other times, I just couldn't get it all to fit, and by the time I'd adjusted and re-adjusted, my strip was 1/2" shorter than when I first cut it.

I'd start with a "long" strip - 2/3 of the length of the boat or so. I'd bevel one end and file the bead until it fit where it was going. Then I'd cut the other end off a couple of inches past a form. I'd sand the bevel for the scarf joint on the bench sander, apply glue to the bead, and staple the strip in place. Then I'd take a second strip and cut and fit the "difficult" end on the other side - where it fit into the weave. When it was good I'd put it in place dry, lay it on top of the beveled end of the strip it was to be joined to, and mark where to cut the end for the scarf joint. I'd leave it 1/8" proud. Then I'd take the cut-off end to the belt sander and sand down the bevel for the scarf joint. Since I'd left the end a little long, I'd usually have to go back after a trial fit and sand a tiny bit more, but it didn't take very long. Using the belt sander allowed me to shorten the strip by tiny increments easily, until I had a perfect fit. It worked great.

The couple of times I tried to use full length strips, I had to be super careful beveling both ends, leaving the whole strip a tiny bit long, so that it would fit snug against both ends. Once or twice I got it to work, but the last time I tried it, I ended up with a strip with good bevels on both ends, but which turned out to be about 1/4 too short. I ended up cutting off one end of that strip, using the other end, and never trying another full-length strip.

In answer to the second part of your question, I found the best place to put the scarf joints was just to one side of a form. That way, the side that was stapled to the form would be strong enough to hold the proper curvature, but with the joint just to one side, there was room to put a C-clamp around the joint to make the spliced strip fair.

Check out the link below. It shows what I was doing early in the process, so there are some things I did differently later. It shows a joint right on top of a form, because it was before I settled on putting the joints next to the forms. It also shows putting joints in two successive strips together. It's an aesthetic blunder, but shouldn't affect the ultimate strength of the boat.

One more thing: I want to echo what I heard someone else say. Make your splices away from the ends. There's so much curvature at the ends that it puts too much strain on the joint - it tends to move despite the C-clamp. You can do it, but it's much easier to put your joints somewhere in the middle. There's probably 6-8 feet in the middle where there isn't so much curvature, so there's plenty of room for staggering joints.

All of this is hard to explain in words. Pictures make it much plainer. Check out the link.