I received a comment to yesterday's post, about running an interior stringer at the deck to upper hull side joint instead of the exterior one per plan, from Dave in Oz that I think is worth posting about. That is posting instead of responding in the comments section.

Before venturing down the road of building a Wharram Tiki 26, I spent a fair amount of time researching these boats and the construction method. My goal, other than dreaming of fast passages and sailing right up onto calm isolated beaches, was to understand the good and the bad. I looked at other cats and I worked on my own designs. As I don't have much experience with sailing cats, I thought I'd build a modest sized boat and test it out before venturing onwards. The inner stringer, which I believe is called the deck clamp, is in this case meant to serve as a way to land the upper edge of the hull side and the outer edge of the deck/cabin side. In my readings and from an understanding of how glass cloth likes to lay it seemed better to me to add the outer stringer to the boat after the exterior glass had been added. If you go back a couple of posts you'll see that I round off this edge so the glass can make this bend. My research showed that other builders have experienced leaks at this point because there is no over lap of the glass normally. The hull glass comes up to the stringer and the deck glass goes down over the stringer following its profile. The deck -hull joint is one that can experience significant stress particularity in Wharrams where the hulls hang off of the beams that land on the deck and are lashed to the stringer. My goal here is not to change the design but to strengthen this joint. Hopefully my approach will do so. One thing about the way that I am putting the pieces together is that it moves away from Wharram's certain and simple way of building into a more complex one. This is something I am keeping in mind - I don't want to make things unnecessarily complex.