: Painted or varnished
: cloth has prooven to be more than adequate and it's a whole lot
: easier to apply than the stick mess that comes out of a PL tube.

My original idea for using it was because the PL was by far the toughest skin coating I had ever seen. I still think that. It lost some of its luster, in my eyes, due to needing an overcoat for uv protection.

As for paint or varnish being adequate, that is often true . . . but certainly not always. I have had many instances of paint or varnish getting scraped off along the keel (when going over rocks or whatever), or even flaking off on areas of great stress (like under my heels). Then those areas leak. It's only annoying, and easy to fix, of course, but the PL is never going to scape or flake off, and isn't going to leak.

And, fillers are very useful for filling the weave of a fabric. It takes 3+ coats to do that with paint or varnish . . . .

Anyway, I have not coated an entire skin with the PL, so I can't comment on that - but I do use it, and advocate using it, to coat high stress areas like along the keel and possibly the lower chines. It has worked well in those applications for me.

Of longevity, I can only say that I have the original test pieces and they are nearly a year old by now - and they seem unchanged. The real world usage, for me, can't yet be considered long term.