"I bought this set for the pirate ship build rather than the island build. However, the instructions are really made for the island build. You have to do the island first then transform it into the ship, there wasn't a good way of bypassing some of the build steps to skip right to the ship. But with that said, I am actually glad I built the island first, it was a rewarding and attractive build and much larger than expected. However, I still prefer it as a boat and will be leaving it displayed as a boat.
The boat build was intuitive and fun, I really liked the contoured haul they gave the ship. The boat is larger than I anticipated. I was able to make some modifications to the insides of the ship to allow for placing cannons instead of using the windows (I had to use 5 of my own cannons since it only came with 3). I had to remove almost all of the inside details and had to move part of the framing of the boat over one brick to make all the cannons fit.
Overall a nice build. I wish the island base was more usable while the set is built as the ship, but I love the ship."