I have taken Rob Mack's advise and stained my wobbly centre accent strip to blend with the field, but what I wanted to do was share my first experience staining a boat.

i anticipated difficulties with the white accents and the headache of cleaning the stain from them, so I experimented until i found a better solution.

I used Behlens Solarlux and it is quite a strong and brilliant stain. The first coat I put on I had to sand off because I had a hard time getting the stain on evenly. I used Behlens reducer and their retarder to try to slow it down.

What I did in my final attempt was mask the accent strips and spray the stain on with a spray gun. The results were good and when I removed the masking from the accents I had nice crisp edges with no bleeding under the edge of the tape at all.

I used a light-medium coat with quick passes of the gun, reduced (with Behelns reducer) at 100 %, or 1 -1 ratio and with a tiny amount of retarder it seemed to help with material transfer. Behlens recommends 30 lbs pressure at the gun and there was a fair amount of overspray.

I am please with the result and now have the glass on the deck.

I have decades of auto painting in my background, but with a decent quality spray gun I'm sure most could do the same.