Rowing Boat with 13 men crew and 26 infantry passengers

Another humble contribution for our February show game in Hamburg was one of the rowing boats Perry Miniatures released last autumn. It a pretty piece sculpted by Alan Perry to represent a Napoleonic British rowing boat used for several landing operations during the campaigns in Flanders, Egypt, Denmark and Spain as well as in the whole Carribean area:

The boat itself is a two part resin kit with six rowing seamen attached already. In addition there's a supplemantary set of six further seaman and a coxswain giving it a crew of 13 Royal Navy seamen.

However the boats were meant to transport troops so troops were needed to man the 28mm equivalent as well. For this purpose Alan created two sets of sitting redcoats which fits perfectly on the boat's benches. One of the set comes with 18 soldiers joint to thress or fours while the other contains eight solitary figures to supply bow and stern with brave Brits. Altogether the boat has a complete 26 figure infantry unit in addition to the 13 men Navy crew!

Painting the boat was a rather unusual experience. The Navy figures were pretty much business as usual. Although seated the rowers were complete figure that I painted more or less like any other 28mm miniature. But the strung readcoats were a challenge. On the one hand the missing feet made the surface to paint smaller which should cause time saving. But on the other hands the details were much more difficult to reach causing loos of time. After all I presume painting these chaps caught sligtly less time then painting 18 standing figures.

The solitary figures of course went in the normal manner. Especially the officers are wonderful sculpts wearing the top hat which feeld iconic for the early campaign especially the campaign in Egypt. For that reason I decided to use the 'old' pre-1801 colours. It is doubtful whether the units at Aboukir carried these or whether they had received new colours with the Irish Saint Andrew's cross early enough. Since I wanted to use the wonderful colours by GMB again I opted for the oldish version since the newer (Peninsular) version is already bearing the battle honour for Egypt.

On our table we had three of these boats in addition to two further rowing boats by Britannia and a British gunboat I built from Laserdreamworks nice lasercut kit.

Unfortunately the boat itself isn't appropriate as an entry since I started working on it before the challenge started. During late summer last year I assembled and painted the hull but didn't manage to complete my work.

During challenge time I reworked the cabin, created the mast and painted three artillery pieces for it. At least the guns might find consideration here.

Well... That's it for now. Of course my share of the Curtgeld project which Michael A., Sander and I executed mutually is pending but this will be brought to your attention by our most appreciated fellow Michael. Yours truly is working on a couple (ten...) T-72 tanks in 15mm but they'll not be finished until our challenge time runs out.