When I was nine I built a Revell submarine kit with my dad. That was actually the first model I ever built. Many, many years later I built a large Revell Cutty Sark kit which was immediately destroyed by a spastic cat. A good 28+ years have passed since then and I have built many aircraft, armor and automotive kits since then but no ships ..... until today.
To tell the truth I did not have any great desire to build a model ship. As some of you may know I have been working on a 1/350 Romulan Bird of Prey and thought it would be neat to build a 1/350 conventional ship simply to use to demonstrate relative size so I started looking around for a nice ship kit. While something like this Kagero kit may not fall into the normal modeler's 'first kit' in a genre I am not your normal modeler. I am definitely abnormal 
Check out this PE sheet that came with it, this is one of two
The basic hull is together with the deck pieces lying in place
And finally the main bridge with about 75% of the PE in place. Keep in mind this entire assembly is barley the size of a US quarter.
I'm finding that I kind of like building ships.