Thanks. Aesthetically (sp?), I'd like to leave the deck unblemished and not bother with the hatches. Afterall, my reason for getting the NB in the first place was to have a "sport" boat to go out and and just do a good "paddle burn". If I need to do some hauling of gear, I can always use my Eclipse. I'm just trying to look at a variety of options before I tear into this thing. Being an engineer, I have a tendency to be anal at times, overanalyze a project a bit before I get started. I know I could always take the approach that I can build this boat one way, and then if I want something different, I can just build another boat. From the sounds of some of the threads here, there seems to be quite a bit of that going on. But I only have so much storage space in the garage. ;-) (I know, just build a bigger garage!) Dennis