On June 3rd we battled at Swan Creek in Tacoma.  The air was full of cottonwood fluff, a nightmare for those with allergies, but the air was also full of steel bbs, a nightmare for any balsa nearby! It was a great day for a battle, moderate weather, good visibility in the pond, very little debris floating.  The turnout for the day was unfortunately small, only three captains were able to attend, myself with the Derfflinger, Darrell with the Warspite and Phill sailed the Westfalen.  We also had the Maru and Suffren in the ‘spare ships’ category for the day. Phill recently spent some timeRead More →

Well, First battle was a sucess. We located many gremlins, though whether or not we will suceed in terminating them at a future point is still undetermined. We had 4 ships today, Phil had the Richelieu, Hovey, in a bit of a throwback to days long gone, commanded the Suffren as his own ships are still in drydock, Darrel as typical had the Warspite and I brought the Derfflinger. We concluded that the best way to split teams was to put the Derf and Suffren vs the Richelieu and Warspite – By units this isn’t very balanced, but looking at spead, maneuverability and general defensivenessRead More →

For the Oct 2nd battle we had good weather and a smaller than typical turnout of captains.  Phill, Darrell, Peter and myself were present. We had numerous guest captains for the cargo vessels and were successful in running 4 very fun sorties. For the battle I mounted a FlipCam that I had more or less waterproofed to the sterndeck of the Maru.  The Maru sailed in the first 2 sorties, the videos below are the results of those sailings.  Read More →

On July 31st, Joe Follansbee of The Fyddeye Guide to America’s Naval History came to visit us at a battle.  He brought with a video camera, shot some video and did some interviews. Afterwards he put together a video overlaying some of those interviews with footage from the battle.  Read More →

We moved up to Coal Creek for this first time this year and found that it had been dredged into a pleasantly large venue, though unfortunately a few feet deeper than we would prefer.  Recent rains had muddied the waters somewhat which would make locating and recovering sunken ships more difficult than usual.Read More →

Well, the labor day battle was.. interesting.. Our pond was really more of a mud hole as they were prepping to dredge and had diverted the waterflow upstream and broken out the dam that builds up the pond itself. As such it turned into a bit of a knife fight in shallow water and tight quarters. We had the Warspite, Richelieu, North Carolina, Scharnhorst, Inconcievable and Derfflinger on the water, Blue team was warspite, i-boat and Richelieu, red team was North Carolina, Derfflinger and Scharnhorst. We also had a photographer from the News Tribune out.  His gallery is here, the associated article is here. TheRead More →

We don’t normally do 2 days of events in a row, so this was a very busy weekend for us, but I think we all had a great time.  Stephen and Keri from StrikeModels joined us for the weekend and the weather was kind enough to not be lousy.   Saturday (July 30th) we had a FunFloat over at hthe Bellevue Downtown Park.  We drew a good number of spectators watching the warships sail and talked with a good assortment of folk.  We even had one gentleman who drove out from Idaho just to check it out – sadly he wasn’t able to stay around forRead More →

On the 17th we had our mid-July battle at Swan Creek.  The weather was a cool 60s with a mostly constant drizzle of rain throughout the day.  The following ships and captains were in attendance, along with a few guests. DKM Graf Spee – Joe DKM Scharnhorst – Pete Liberty Ship – Run by guest captains HMS Invincible – Hovey, captained on sortie #2 by Shylo SMS Westfalen – Phil SMS Derfflinger – Nick Maru – guest-captained by Hovey’s vet whose name I forgot DKM Bismarck – AlexRead More →

The weather was particularly nice for an early May battle.  We had 4 captains – 3 warships and one cargo ship on the pond and had a great time.Read More →