The purpose of covering the wood and fiber glass cloth is to completely seal the wood of the boat from water. I would cutout the cockpit openting as part of glassing the  craft seal the exposed wood with epoxy. It is also reccommended that when add any through the hull accessories one uses the drill, fill, drill approach. Any water that gets into the wood can be very destructive.

glass it when you glass the deck inside and outside.

the final cut to accomodate the coaming riser can be done before or after glassing.  my personal preference is to cut before glassing.  the saw blade is less likely to get hung up on raw cedar vs cedar that has glass on it.

also, if you make a mistake, its much easier to fix/replace some cedar without glass then fixing it after its glassed.

anyway...that's my 2 cents.

h

���Complete sense. I didn't think about making a mistake. Of course there hasn't been any of them to my books so far. Lol. now you know I'm lying. Great point, thanks.

���Though we are talking about the same cut procedure. The inside cut off the actual cockpit opening where you cut the shape of the knee braces too. Not the outside initial cut. Again I have that done up already with the strips. While we are on this topic. I see that people will use a small block to keep an equal distance of height from the recessed deck area when wrapping the lip around. So if that's true then it will directly follow the curve of the recessed area. Meaning my kayak deck forward part of the apex slopes downward then flattens out some toward the at end. That would make the lip be curved if you look at it from the side, not just angled upward grin the back but wavy.

Wow that made no sense.  I was half asleep when I typed that.  I'll try later again when I have the time