I’m working on the same ship. I’ve read that you can trim the bottoms of the strake’s tapering down to up to half the width. I tried it on the strakes below the lower gun deck and it seems to have worked much better than anything I’ve done so far. The wood naturally curves upwards on the bow and there’s nowhere for the extra wood to go otherwise. As a consequence, I have no big gaps, no buckling of the planks, and no excess wood. I did use some stealers on the aft and their equivalents in the front. They were very useful. I would do a search on tapering and stealers to learn how. I have a brief description somewhere in my log. I did wet the planks for thirty minutes or so afterwards.
