I believe that's correct, Scott.  You can't really get things too mixed up, because the plank laps won't match bow to stern if you don't have the pairs correctly mated, because each side is a mirror image of the other.  Just don't get the pieces mixed up and start trying to mate parts of #1 with #2, etc.  They won't fit, but you'll make yourself crazy.  Try to keep the stickers on the planks as long as possible.  I seem to recall that we glued up the planks as pairs, and worked our way through in an orderly fashion from #1 to #4 (or maybe it was the other way round) to cut down on confusion.

PMD has a lot of parts, and it can be somewhat daunting at first.  Don't try to build the whole boat at once.  Just take your time and have fun.

In Howard Chapelle's book on boatbuilding, he stated that a boatbuilder ought to have a "moaning chair," a comfortable place in which the builder might sit and view the work while he was puzzling out stuff like this, maybe with a cup of coffee in hand.  Be careful switching to whisky too early in the work session.  Ahem.  During our PMD build, we spent a lot of time sitting in folding chairs, building manual in hand, scratchin' our heads like monkeys lookin' at a red rubber ball until we gained confidence in our "spatial orientation" and started feeling less like monkeys and more like boatwrights.

.....Michael

Thanks so much Michael! I actually have a chair (now to be called my moaning chair) which seems to allow the pauses I need when I get overwhelmed. Things tend to clear when I just step away. Seems to work for things other than boat building too.