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.
We had a good showing of vessels, Phill brought the french battleship Richelieu and the french heavy cruiser Suffren. Hovey and Andrew brought the american battleship USS North Carolina and british battlecruiser HMS Invincible. Joe and Peter brought the german battleship Scharnhorst and heavy cruiser Graf Spee along with a convoy vessel. Darrell had the british battleship HMS Warspite and I had the Imperial German battlecruiser SMS Derfflinger and a convoy ship (the ubiquitious Maru).
The day was limited to only 2 battles ( 4 sorties) due to the need to handle multiple systems failures, extended ship recovery times from sinks and a few ships being unrepairable. Murphy & Co showed up in force – radios that had previously been rock-solid suddenly exhibiting intereference issues, impellers slipping from motor shafts in pumps, the Derfflinger’s pump motor actually began to disassemble itself with the end-bearing physically exiting the assembly. The Richelieu’s rudder actually sheared apart at the end of the second sortie, the shaft bent and the rudder itself detached from the shaft. Some of these we were able to fix, others we could not. We actually were able to repair the Richelieu’s rudder and she sailed in all of the remaining sorties.
We had numerous sinks most related to Murhpy&Co and the rest mostly from ram damage.
First the sinkings…
The Derf here is technically sunk. Her pump has disassembled itself and without any ability to evacuate water she quietly sinks to the bottom of the shallows.
A pump failure sends the I-boat to the bottom, in an unfortunately deep area.
The Scharnhorst sinks at the shore. Again a pump failure.
The Suffren sinks for reasons I don’t remember, but hey, does it need a reason beyond being French?
Suffren rolls over and sinks, again.
The Warspite sinks mid-sortie, we later discovered it had an area stoved in from a ram.
Warspite sinks early in the first sortie from a ram.
And the rest of the day, in 47 images..
The most important thing though- we all had a lot of fun!