Given that you said 'a few places', I bet it's not as bad as you think. I have some 'dragon skin' on the hull of my Outer Island -- places where the cloth is evident, due to either too much epoxy soaking in or not enough applied in the first place. Even the builders I've met haven't noticed -- unitl I point it out. I hope to attend the Newfound Rendezvous and get some opinions from the experts here on this board.

According to a Coast Guard rescuer that spoke at a local symposium, orange and fuchsia (sp?) are the easiest colors to spot from a distance. Yellow would also be good, but if you want something that won't look too horrendous on a wood kayak, maybe a burnt orange would work. Interlux seems to come in a wide variety of colors.

If the areas that bother you are on the lower hull, mabye you could paint that area up to the shear. If these errors are on the ends but the main part of the sides are still nice, then do a little on the bow and stern as well and leave the middle bright. Get decorative with it. Heck, carve a nice Brunhilde (sp?) complete with horned Viking helmet and bust just about bursting out of her corset and epoxy it to the bow!

Dean

: I know it sounds blasphemous, but my stripping just doesn't look as good as
: I'd like (small gaps in a few places with dookie shmutz filler that I
: couldn't get to match quite right). To cover up my mistakes, I was
: thinking of painting the hull. Anyone else here done that? The deck looks
: nice, so I'll keep that bright. From a safety standpoint (search and
: rescue), I know from experience that flipped over kayaks and canoes that
: are wood colored are very difficult to find because they just look like a
: log in the water. Other colors that are bad are blue, green and white.
: You'd be surprised how much the white hull of a kayak looks just like a
: breaking wave in a bay with a 30 knot wind.

: Just wondering what some of you out there have done.