Rick has written an excellent comment about the previous post - please take the time to look at it, as the idea is very good indeed. I have thought of a similar system, but Ricks is the best idea yet.
Having sailed in a few small boats myself, I concur very strongly with Ross regarding side benches. If the seaway gets a bit active, they get in the way very quickly. If one really MUST have them, they should always be removable, but latched down with buttons so they dont come loose when things get really rough, as sooner or later they will if you sail much.
As for me, same as Ross; sitting low in the bottom of the boat with back against the coaming, or sitting on the windward washboard (side deck) is the way to sail a small boat.
For sleeping with a decent amount of dry, level room in a small open boat, one you wont roll off of, why not build in a pair of risers just above the height of the thwart and the sternsheets, with buttons on the backside of each, facing outward to the hulls planking? Then when you want to sleep aboard, you unroll your strong canvas trampoline, slip its grommets over the buttons, stretching it between the risers, and sleep on that up out of bilgewater and high enough above the thwart and sternsheets to avoid hard corners in your back. On some boats that might create a space wide enough for two to sleep.
No need for the obstruction of side benches at all, and the risers, if made a bit wide in their vertical plane and thought out carefully, notched into half frames, should make a good backrest supplementing the coaming or washboard carlin each side. Adds a bit of weight, but Ill wager that itll be a lot less than the side benches, with no obstruction of internal space and no loose hunks of wood coming loose on you at the worst possible time.
Also, Geoff Leedham has emailed me to say that there is no obvious support for the seats when in the centre location. The cleats for the centre location hadnt been installed at the time the photos of the seats in the "side seat" location were taken. However, in the shot where you can see the seats butted together in the centre "sleeping flat" position, there are 19mm x 19mm (3/4" x 3/4") cleats screwed to the forward face of the stern sheets, and to the aft face of the main thwart. Look at this photo and you can see the outer cleats - there are similar ones under the "sleeping flat" set-up on the centreline. It is a very simple arrangement.
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Having sailed in a few small boats myself, I concur very strongly with Ross regarding side benches. If the seaway gets a bit active, they get in the way very quickly. If one really MUST have them, they should always be removable, but latched down with buttons so they dont come loose when things get really rough, as sooner or later they will if you sail much.
As for me, same as Ross; sitting low in the bottom of the boat with back against the coaming, or sitting on the windward washboard (side deck) is the way to sail a small boat.
For sleeping with a decent amount of dry, level room in a small open boat, one you wont roll off of, why not build in a pair of risers just above the height of the thwart and the sternsheets, with buttons on the backside of each, facing outward to the hulls planking? Then when you want to sleep aboard, you unroll your strong canvas trampoline, slip its grommets over the buttons, stretching it between the risers, and sleep on that up out of bilgewater and high enough above the thwart and sternsheets to avoid hard corners in your back. On some boats that might create a space wide enough for two to sleep.
No need for the obstruction of side benches at all, and the risers, if made a bit wide in their vertical plane and thought out carefully, notched into half frames, should make a good backrest supplementing the coaming or washboard carlin each side. Adds a bit of weight, but Ill wager that itll be a lot less than the side benches, with no obstruction of internal space and no loose hunks of wood coming loose on you at the worst possible time.
Also, Geoff Leedham has emailed me to say that there is no obvious support for the seats when in the centre location. The cleats for the centre location hadnt been installed at the time the photos of the seats in the "side seat" location were taken. However, in the shot where you can see the seats butted together in the centre "sleeping flat" position, there are 19mm x 19mm (3/4" x 3/4") cleats screwed to the forward face of the stern sheets, and to the aft face of the main thwart. Look at this photo and you can see the outer cleats - there are similar ones under the "sleeping flat" set-up on the centreline. It is a very simple arrangement.
After getting the rub strips on the splash rails, I had some short pieces of rub strip that I could experiment with bending to fit the bow of the boat. I traced the bow of the boat onto a 2x6 and then made the curve a bit more acute and cut it out on the band-saw. I sawed a shallow groove into the middle of the edge to align the rub strip, screwed one side down and then bent it around the corner. It bent OK, but with the spring back, it didnt fit the boat at all. 
followed....albeit it slowly...one hole at a time. 
Each side was done with two 6 pieces as I was too cheap to pay the ridiculous shipping costs of 12 pieces. In the end, it all worked out as it would have been nearly impossible to handle 12 pieces and do the finesse work at the ends. 
I couldnt be happier with the look of the rub strips. All my worry beads about the look at the bow, the joint fits, and end treatment have been taken care of.
