July 30/31st Recap – NW Naval Combat

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 for the Sunday battle.

Phill brought out the Richelieu and the Mogador so that we could see something different than the usual ships he brings to battles. Hovey brought the Insufferable which promptly lived up to its name by sinking and wrecking its own drivetrain. I had the Derfflinger with me, Alex brought the Bismarck – always a crowd-pleaser, Joe and Peter brought the Scharnhorst, Graf Spee and a liberty ship out and Stephen had the South Carolina, which I think we all decided was just the neatest little ship.

Stephen showed off some new and interesting things, such as his injection molded cannon tees, interrupter pins and pump impellers.

After about 4 or so hours of sailing, chatting and generally enjoying the sun we packed everything up and headed to Azteca for a group dinner and to continue conversations before ending the evening.

Sunday (July 31st) we meandered our way down to Swan Creek in Tacoma for the battle. I was somewhat dismayed that we did indeed have visitors who were showing up on time (10) as we regularily require an hour for everyone to straggle in and get ready – I think the announcements are going to start making note that guests and spectators should consider showing up an hour later if they’re not interested in chatting us up and watching us work on things before the battle.

We managed 4 sorties in varying states of combat effectiveness. For the teams we had:

Red Team: