Varnish Question: patch or strip to bare wood

[jimp1234]

During the last few weeks I've been practicing my varnish technique on smaller items like dorade boxes, handrails and coaming tops, and now I'm ready to tackle the caprails. I had no access to the boat for the last 5 months and unfortunately the condition of the caprail varnish has deteriorated. About 85% of the caprails look to be in good enough condition for maintenance coats, with 15% needing to be "patched". These bad areas are mostly cracked and starting to peel varnish with just a small number of small areas with no varnish and bare wood showing. My plan would be to carefully sand these bad spots then put on two or three coats of varnish before starting on the overall maintenance coats. Is the plan workable or do I need to strip the caprails down to bare wood? TIA

[coopec43]

I think your plan is a good one that is to re-varnish the bad patches then look at going over the whole lot. You'd soon get an idea if it is going to look OK.

If it doesn't look acceptable then sand down ..........the whole lot.

In Australia they are switching over to water based paints and varnishes. I hope you can still get the oil based varnish that I presume was previously used on the yacht? (Maybe you wouldn't notice the difference?)