How to build a runabout

Vandenburgh says research is a way of stalling, an excuse for not writing.  She writes:

Bodega? In California, where I live, a bodega actually means something that more approximates storeroom.  Around here, in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, the little store on the corner is more likely the tienda; the open-air market's a mercado.  The bodega?  It's a wine bar in Europe, while in the big cities of the East Coast, only the corner grocery, the bodega, would hold a character like GiGi.  Why do I mention this?  Because it's so very easy to get sidetracked as you enter the House of Plot in all these writerly diversions, whereby you allow your story to be linguistically hijacked, so you can stop doing what you're doing (which is being confused) and go do a little research.  It's all so very interesting!  It's also stalling.  We stall because we're afraid to commit to the upward trudge, to confront the vast amounts of darkness at the top of the stairs, to take this darkness in, to admit that it pertains to us, to admit the first thing about the monumentality of what we don't know, that we cannot find out by using conventional research methods.  page 63-64

This may be the historian in me talking, but I don't quite agree with her here.  I find research inspiring and helpful when I get stuck.  Research can create characters, situations, and even worlds that you could never imagine otherwise.  I often find myself researching animals, birds, insects.  I like what they can say about people.  I guess her main point, though is to not get so caught up in research that you forget to write.

That being said, I've been researching boat building today.

A big part of my novella is going to revolve around building a runabout.  I've never built a boat before.  Actually, I've never really built anything.  I don't know where the idea for the runabout came from.  But I'm sure it has something to do with watching my father build Volkswagen engines when I was younger.  My father always has a project, so, naturally, the father in my novella is going to have a project that his daughter, the main character, is going to become interested in.

Though I don't want to get too technical in my novella, I would like to sound like I know what I'm talking about.  I've been trying to familiarize myself with the basics, such as framing, planking, battens, jigs, and the technical terms for boat parts.  Here are some websites that I've found particularly interesting:

http://www.glen-l.com/designs/hankinson/buildingmahogrunabouts.html
http://www.bronkalla.com/layout.html
http://intheboatshed.com/index.php?option=com_glossary&Itemid=67
http://www.thelittleboatshop.com/rascalrunabout.html