After three weeks of taking care of my 95-year-old convalescing mother, I am now taking her up to stay with my older sister for a while. My sister is retired and lives in Washington state, so the journey from the central California coast is a long one. For safety reasons, and in order to carry everything my mother will need, we are traveling by train – a bedroom aboard an Amtrak sleeper car. It’s certainly not the most luxurious way to travel, but it works, and we get to see some beautiful scenery.
Travel means that this ship modeler again finds himself without a ship-modeling project for several days. However, I was fortunate enough to have had a paper model kit to work on for a bit, and very much enjoyed the time I got to spend on that.
I won’t go into a lot of detail, except to recap that I ordered a model kit from Ages of Sail, a Shipyard paper model kit of the 17th century Dutch fluit Schwarzer Rabe. Don’t ask me why a Dutch fluit has a German name – I don’t know. But, it is a nice looking ship, at least in the way that the manufacturer portrays it. The ship was a real ship and participated in the Battle of Oliwa in 1627 between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Navy and the Swedish Navy. The Schwarzer Rabe was part of the 1st squadron of the Polish side of the battle. One of her opponents was the Dutch-built ship Papegojan, of which Shipyard also makes two kits.
Ship Modeler 