I too had a lot of issues early on with orange peel.

I researched many forums to find out what I was doing wrong, but in the end I attribute it to the instruction manual saying to use 120 grit between coats; 120 simply did not create enough tooth for subsequent coats of epoxy to hold on to and the result was a wrinkly, bumpy orange peel finish.

By the time I had sanded the orange peel smooth I would have also sanded through to bare wood in several spots. I found out that MAS called for scuff sanding with a much coarser grit between coats and also said you could apply a second coat within 12 hours (as long as the first coat was still tacky) and you wouldn't even need to scuff sand at all....Really wish the CLC manual had mentioned that. Could have saved some time and effort.

Once I started scuff sanding with 80 grit between coats the orange peel problem was gone. Unfortunately it took about 4 tries for me to figure this out and I wasted a lot of epoxy. 

So my recommendation is to use 80 grit between coats and sand the final coat with the recommended 220 for a smooth finish prior to varnishing.

In any case, after finding numerous tiny discrepancies like this, I always take the CLC instruction manual with a grain of salt and refer back/cross reference with the actual instructions provided by the product manufacturer. 

I would use a random orbit sander to get rid of all the orange peel, but then I found that a sanding block was better. It really isn't that hard to use the sanding block and I have much more control and less chance of sanding through to the bare wood.

I also found that the Norton sanding disks didn't load as fast as the cheap "gator" sandpaper they sell at lowes.

Good luck!

I too found the epoxy left a lot of defects in the finish. I had the benefit of being able to using fairing compounds over it as I painted my boat.  I am assuming you are going to leave it natural and are going to need a much smother finish in the epoxy than I did. The natural parts of my boat needed a lot of sanding to remove all orange peal and low points. I used my random orbital sander for most of the work and would recommend you do the same due simply to the amount of material you will need to remove to fair epoxy and also how hard epoxy is to work with. For every coat I used 80 grit sand paper because even the finished coat left rather significant low points.  Once I was happy with the final sanding I took it down to 180-220 before varnishing.

I did experiment with thinning the epoxy (not recommended as it significantly reduces strength) and found that it didn’t improve the finish much. Bottom line is that it’s a tedious task.

   thank you both!  This is great information.