Re: MariDeck vs Marine standard vinyl
I put the Cabela's brand grey textured flooring (surely made by Nautolex, it's virtually the same stuff) in my Starcraft 15' tri-hull 7 years ago.
It has held up fairly well, considering I didn't do a great prep job on the deck, I spread the adhesive too thin, I didn't keep the boat covered as much as I should have (SoCal sun did fade it), and I occasionally rinsed the floor with dilute bleach to get rid of cut bait smell and fish blood (also faded it). I know better about all these things now.
The downsides are that it doesn't conform to bends/corners very easily, and that it is not very cut-resistant (as attested to by the areas behind my lounge seats where the cut ends of the pole supports cut the flooring, and a few areas where I dropped tools and knives.) Also, if you don't glue it down real good, water will get under it...and it takes a metric crap-ton of adhesive to stick this stuff down properly, particularly so that edges don't peel up. The texture does also retain a lot of dirt.
I'm redoing my boat interior now. If I had a perfectly flat deck (or could wrap it around edges like in the pics in the previous post) and nothing that would gouge or cut it, I would not hesitate to use it again (with proper prep and install, of course). In fact, I am going to use stored leftovers to wrap kickplates and hatch covers, cover the inner gunwales, etc.
I
may use it again for flooring, but I'm leaning toward a deck coating (Overton's Tuff-Cote, Durabak, or the like) instead because I think it will take more abuse and be easier to hose down.
