Thanks Patsy, the other method would be to glue each diamond in place, one-by-one on the boat. It's not as hard as it sounds. Gluing up a "loaf" off the boat like I did has its share of pitfalls and I ended up doing a lot of one-by-one gluing anyway, correcting problems as they happened.

Epoxy will bond to some stains: analine dye, gel coat... water based stains. I hear selected others will work too. There are a fair number of posts floating around re. what does/doesn't work (here and at www.clcboats.com). The big thing is to do a swatch test first. My Chesapeake 17' is over three years old and it's fine.