My daughter and I decided to build a kayak for fun. I bought Nick's book and it managed to convince me that someone with no experience and limited woodworking skills could build a really good boat. Actually Nick's book was great and told us almost everything we needed to know, but when things got a little difficult we could usually find the information we needed by searching on this bulletin board - so thanks for all the help you guys gave me!

I thought it might be useful to share a few thought from an absolute beginner to encourage anyone else thinking of trying it.

Sedna took a year to build, she's adapted from the Great Auk design to be 15ft long because my garage is only 16ft 6inches! One problem was placing the cockpit because we wanted to keep it the same size as the standard great auk cockpit, which meant we had to guess where the new centre of gravity would be. Looking at the photos of the boat on the water I think we may have got it slightly too far back, but the boat behaves really well so I'm not too concerned.

We were having difficulty getting any of the woods listed in Nick's book at a reasonable price (we live in England, UK), but eventually bought some imported Douglas Fir from a timber merchant. It's a bit heavier than cedar but generally worked very well. We used a bit of Meranti on the deck to make a pattern, but the colour isn't much different from Douglas fir, and it's quite a heavy wood.

We cut the strips with a very cheap hand held circular saw, which made it difficult to cut a constant quarter inch width - I think most of the strips were nearer to 8mm, but we had a lot of sanding to get everything smooth. That's one job I would do a different way if we build another one. We didn't use cove and bead but tried to plane the strips to the correct angle, we were a bit too enthusiastic and ended up with small gaps between the strips on the inside, which we filled later. We made a detachable end piece at each end of the skeleton which became part of the boat, this helped enormously when fitting the strips because there was something solid to fix them to. Staples didn't seem to work too well for us, probably because douglas fir at 8mm wide was just too stiff, so we used 30mm panel pins - the holes are a little bigger than staple holes but there are less of them, and as beginners appearance wasn't necessarily top of our priority list.

We didn't have the confidence to build the cockpit coaming from strips so we built it up from plywood.

We bought the epoxy and fibreglass from Fyne Boats, unfortunately they didn't specify the weight of the fibreglass, but basically we used one layer inside and out, and two on the hull. The end result was a very solid boat, if a little heavy. According to my scales she came in at 28kg, which means I can carry her very short distances only.

Now comes the only real difficulty we had: after fibreglassing we were in a hurry and tried to varnish a couple of days after the last coat of epoxy. We used Rustins tung oil based yacht varnish, and it simply refused to dry. I think the problem was probably amine blush, but the only solution was to scrape the varnish off, wash everything down and start again. I wasn't entirely sure what the cause of the problem was so we changed the varnish to International yacht varnish, which we bought from B & Q. That seemed to work absolutely fine.

If you look closely at the woodwork you can see a few areas of filler, and there are plenty of changes I would make another time, but we've had so much fun building and paddling her, I don't regret a minute of it.