Can you balance the amount of work involved with building a strip kayak (which is a TON) with the fact that it will be too big for him at first, then he will outgrow it and it will be small for him pretty quickly. Then what do you do with the kayak? A friend of mine built a Yost kayak in about 20 hours over two weekends, and it's his favorite kayak of three. Even a small strip kayak is going to run you 200+ hours, and cost a TON more to build.

Dan Caouette has a design he calls "Coos Bay" that is smaller than a Sea Flea, so you won't even have to compromise on size. There is also a kid's kayak design on Harvey Golden's web site called "Max's Kayak." If you search this forum for Coos Bay you'll come up with that, or if you do a web search you'll hit Dan's web site. If you search QajaqUSA you'll run across the other, or you can do a web search for Harvey Golden, and find it at his site. The lines are there. You can just slip a broomstick under the rear deck lines with a couple of pieces of pool noodle on either end and voila... removable sponsons.

m