: How should I make this strip less offensive?
: . . .I would appreciate your comments on the above and/or any suggestions
: of other possible solutions.

Don't hide it, flaunt it.

Sign your name and the construction date, desing, boat name, or other information right there on that prominent strip. Do it like John Hancock, whose signature dwarfs others on the US Declaration of Independence. Do it with a flourish.

Let people think you put it there as a signature strip. You don;t need to tell them otherwise.

If you use a dark brown ink or a concentrated stain as your writing fluid, and write boldly, the lighter background will work well with the darker pigment, and the area's overall color tone will appear darker than it is now, but you'll have good readability of the words.

Print out a couple copies of your picture, and use them for guides as to type font or script style you wish to employ, color of your writing, and size and placement of the words. You might even contact anyone in your local area who does lettering on vans and trucks, or paints signs. They might be willing to do the work for you for a reasonable fee. I know the local sign painters in MY area have much better penmanship than I do.

If you are committed to color matching, replacement with a veneer strip or total replacement are really your only options. Id try the veneer route first. If I screwed that up I'd be halfway toward replacing the whole strip anyhow.

Use a router to remove the lighter wood down to a depth of 1/16th of an inch. Use a chisel to clean up the edges. It looks like the area you have to remove is going to be too large to do neatly with a chisel alone. If you have a plane with a narrow iron you might try that, but such tools are not very common. Then again, if you wanted to rework a plane iron on a grinder to narrow the cutting edge, you could make something that would do the job.

Hope this helps.

PGJ