This is a request for suggestions, criticism, and advice on yet another version of Rushton's Wee Lassie. The goal is not to be different--it's to meet specific requirements efficiently. Some background is therefore essential.
I'm a little guy and pushing 70 years old. I canoe quiet waters in remote, lonely wilderness--that requires portages. I come to canoe, so doubling a portage is not where it's at. Gear and food come to thirty pounds, leaving only 15 pounds or thereabouts for a canoe. I've been using a single-blade paddle for well over half a century and prefer it to a double-blade but I concede, after several tries, that a canoe within my weight limits demands a double-blade. Hence the desire for a canoe that allows a shorter double-blade to be used more like a single-blade.
My proposed solution is to retain the design of Wee Lassie from the 6” waterline down but to introduce tumblehome in the midship section to 23” width at the gunwale and to increase overall length by eight inches.
I propose to strip-build with 3/16” strips, single-layer 4-oz. fabric and epoxy outside with graphite filler in the final fill-coat below the 4” waterline, and 2-oz fabric and epoxy inside. This construction requires some explanation, and I invite criticism.
For the last 20+ years my wife and I have been using a 14' 9” 44-lb. stripper of slender design with 1-1/2 layers of 4-oz. Fabric inside and out with graphite as above. We've hit some big submerged rocks at good speed, both head-on and off-center, and never sustained damage greater than shallow, easily repaired scratches. I suspect that the boat glances off, avoiding a rupture, cut, or gouge, because of the graphite. Theoretically, 350 pounds of loaded canoe at a given speed (the above example) produces much greater impact than 190 pounds at the same speed (the proposed solo). My guess is that the lighter, more lightly built boat will be no more susceptible to damage than the heavier, more heavily built boat, and that even if I'm wrong the result will be a repairable gouge or rupture, not a stranded-in-the-wilderness disaster.
I have a lines drawing of my proposed modification in bitmap but don't know how to (or if I can) attach it here.

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