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If you do it please take photos. Your boat's inside resembles mine when I purchased it. How are you going to strip the paint? If the original gel were in great shape it would have never been painted. In my case it was painted early in its life with a sucession of four coats. Applied by preschoolers apparently. The paint prevented the crazing and spider webbing a lot of boats have but it was to cover a large repair in nearly the exact spot in the stern area as yours. It was repaired by stuffing pink fiberglass insulation in the hole and covering it with a half to quarter inch of Marine-tex. I've ground off the non skid pattern. No original boat I've ever seen with it ever looks clean with it. I'm going to use Binky's non skid sand method. If you can try to get the paint soda blasted off. I wasted a lot of time and energy hand stripping mine.