Wow, thanks all for the quick comments. Sounds like this is going to be a bit more of a process than just choosing a color and slapping it on (why would anything be straight forward). My experience with stain has extended to spreading a coat of 'oak' minwax on some furniture i've made over the years so this will be a new journey should i pursue it. As you pointed out, i will definately not use stain if epoxy doesn't adhere (that would have been a huge dissappointment). I also didn't think about the change in color over time which will certainly be difficult to predict. To answer the question 'why'? I'm attempting to visually pull the hull 'color' onto the deck with my design to avoid the deck and hull from looking as two distictly seperate pieces. This would have been easy if i were doing a full stripper, but since its my first build i decided to take what i was told is the slightly easier route and go hybrid. I will post a drawing of the deck design i'm planning out tonight to give you a better idea(at work right now). The cherry takes up i'd say 1/5 of the deck, but as I said, i'm open to any 'darker' wood in place of the cherry since it sounds like i'll be adding alot of unnecessary weight.

Thanks again for all the quick responses and please keep them coming! I'll follow up with a deck design image tonight.

Damian