A better example needed for Excercise 59 - Canoe, in training manual level 1

It is not very hard to get it smooth but its a bad idea to even try because it produces a degenerate surface. You don’t want a degenerate surface because it will guarantee that the shell command (and other commands) will fail.

Your previous technique of creating the surface so that it goes past the centerline and then trimming back to the centerline is a far superior way to make the shape if you want to continue modeling further without trouble.