Hi Randy,

If you can finish a plane, let alone 3, you can certainly build the boat. One advantage to that design, the 18 footer, is that you can rob the rig from a beach cat to make it less expensive to build. Lots of boats like a Hobie 18 on the market to get relatively cheap.

While that design can be built in plywood, it's designed as foam cored fiberglass. It's not a terribly difficult process and the foam core panels are much lighter and easier to handle than full sheets of plywood. If I build it I'll very likely modify the bottoms to strip plank them, but I've been building boats for lots of years so modifying the plans doesn't bother me in the least. Most are better, like with an aircraft, to stick to the plans.

Learning to sail with a used boat was a good suggestion, not hard to do and little sailboats teach lessons quickly and safely and used ones are inexpensive an fairly easy to sell once you're past the learning stage. A sunfish is a fun boat regardless, sails well and while wet is easy to sail and store when you're done using it.

You will need someway to move the Scarab and store it when it's completed, it's not real long but it is real wide (unfolded), so if you leave it in the water you usually will have to have an end dock, worth looking into because in some areas docks are expensive.

The company selling the plans now has I think a source of the folding brackets all CNC cut, that makes it a bit less of a challenge.

Nice thing about this boat is there's not a lot of stuff to build inside the cabin. On bigger boats the cabin can be as much work as building everything else, cut a part, climb up into the boat, test fit it, take it back out of the boat, trim the part, k climbing up into the boat etc. etc.

Btw, I'm 65 and I won't be starting this project for at least 3 or 4 years, so I know where you're coming from.

Bill H.