Louie da fly

Deck planking finished to the point where I have to stop for the time being. I need to leave a certain amount open to see through so I know where to fix the lower bank of oars. And second anchor roughly cut to shape. Steven

Tecko, that water is incredibly convincing! I've bookmarked your build so I can steal your ideas when I go to make a diorama. Steven

Greg, have you been to Point Cook airbase to see the restored Walrus they have there? Not really anything to do with this build (which is amazing - when I grow up I want to be this good), but worth a look. Steven

It looked totally ok! No obvious problems with the grain, no obvious knots, then SNAP! Well I've replaced the spar and well into number three of four. Wish me luck! Steven

That looks REALLY good, Tecko! I only wish I could be up there to see it in person. Steven

Thanks for the good wishes, Pat, but it's just too far for me to drill, especially as I don't have a drill press. I expect I'll find another use for the piece of wood, and in the meantime I'm making up a replacement. Steven

Just working on the second spar of the lateen yard and - AAAARGHHH!!. There must have been a flaw in the wood. I was filing it all smooth after having trimmed it almost to shape with a Stanley knife, and the end broke clean off. Nothing I can do. If I glue it back together it will just break again, probably at the most inconvenient possible time. I thought maybe a pin joining the two ends, but I really don't have the equipment (or the skill) to drill to that level of precision. And after all that work, too. Still, I'd rather have it happen now than later. And I have plenty more wood, so off we go again with a new piece, starting all over again. By the way, I should have been a little more informative regarding the Serce Limani anchor. It would originally have had a stock, but being made of wood it would have disintegrated in the 1000 years underwater since she sank. Steven

Thanks Patrick. I thought he would be about that size. Steven

Beautiful work, as usual, Patrick. Just out of interest, how tall is that "crew member" in your last photo? Steven

Mark, Yes, if by a lateral bar you mean the anchor stock. In fact, the original picture I was working from has since been superseded by more accurate drawings of all the Serce Limani anchors in the book Serçe Limani: An Eleventh-Century Shipwreck Vol. 1, The Ship and Its Anchorage, Crew, and Passengers by G. F. Bass, S. D. Matthews, J. R. Steffy, and F. H. Van Doorninck. A preview can be seen at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=E6ZJ-05aC-sC&pg=PA237&lpg=PA237&dq=serce+limani+wreck+anchor&source=bl&ots=2c7A-6VvFY&sig=RSqn4jY5rzHnXn7M80QDf6Wdq9Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj40c_1v8PdAhUD57wKHV-oCHUQ6AEwC3oECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=serce limani wreck anchor&f=false, (you'll have to do a bit of scrolling to get to the right bit) I've had to somewhat revise the form the anchor has taken, but only in fairly minor details - the hole for the stock turns out to be circular and the housing for it is diamond-shaped, and the shank is also circular in section. I wasn't all that happy with the first anchor anyway, but I've made it as close as I could to the later version. I'll probably still use it - otherwise it's a lot of work wasted. It's not surprising that the drawings have been revised - there was a lot of rust and concretions which would disguise the true form of the anchor on first investigation. After all, it's been at the bottom of the sea for almost 1000 years (the ship probably sank in about 1025 AD, judging by the coins she had on board). Steven

More planking. I've decided that 4 isolated planks each side is enough for my purposes - more than that looks wrong. So I've started on the other side. Here's the first anchor under construction. It's almost complete - compare it with the pictures on the previous page. I will blacken it and add a stock in due course. The dromons of the Crete expedition were to be provided with 6 anchors each. Anchors of the time were relatively light - the Serce Limani wreck had 9 wrought iron anchors ranging in weight from 50 to 65 kilograms (100 to 130 lb), all to the same basic design, arranged in two stacks on the foredeck. It appears that the snapping of the stern anchor (the snapped anchor has been recovered) as the ship sought refuge in the bay from a storm was the cause of the ship's loss - they didn't have time to drop another anchor. And the anchor on the foredeck to give an idea of scale. And here's one of the spars of the lateen yard in progress. Steven

That's a very good point, Mark. So maybe I did the right thing after all, albeit unknowingly. Certainly, there is a lot of bracing in the hull in the shape of stringers and wales,and in fact Prof Pryor did make the point that the decking would have provided much needed stiffness to a hull that was very long and thin - I'd just forgotten that he'd done so (a senior moment,perhaps?). Steven

Wow! Amazing work! I'd never heard of the Girona, so I looked her up. Fascinating history. Apart from the treasure, was much of the wreck itself recovered? Steven

Thanks for all the likes. It's good to feel others are following along with the build and enjoying it, and perhaps even think I'm on the right track, (something I sometimes have doubts about). Though the argument for dromons being fully decked is as usual based on far too little information and indirect references in contemporary records, from the evidence he provides I am satisfied that Prof Pryor is correct in stating that they were fully decked. The most telling in my view is the testimony of John Kaminiates who had been forced to row in a dromon captured by Arabs in 904: “ ... the barbarians with us put themselves on the upper benches and left the lower [benches] to us, which were full of deep gloom and evil smells, and could only be described as a floating grave”. However, I don't believe this invalidates my idea of planking with small gaps between - below decks would still have received little light under these circumstances. I'd been hoping that his using the word "gloom" instead of "dark" would have reinforced this idea, but unfortunately that's how it was translated, not how it reads in the original Greek, which has "much darkness" (or perhaps "great darkness"). By the way, I was recently lucky enough to be shown a number of pinus nigra (black pine) trees growing in a forest planted over 100 years ago in Creswick, about 20 minutes drive from home. This is the timber the planks of my dromon should have been made of if I'd had access to it, instead of the ubiquitous pinus radiata from the local hardware shop I was obliged to use. I took home a (small) fallen branch and was pleasantly surprised to find the two timbers look very similar. Steven

Looking great, Christos! Steven

Great to see this one under way, Chris. A whole new adventure! Steven

It is said that Queen Elizabeth the First had a bath once a month, whether she needed one or not. 😝 Steven

I agree. The colouring looks really good and lifelike. Steven

Thanks, Pat. On reflection and referring back to Age of the Dromon, I'm actually wondering if I shouldn't have made the whole deck this way. Prof Pryor states that a dromon should have at least 8 square metres for air entry and somewhat more for it to exit. I'm struggling to get 8 overall, even taking the hatch and the companionway into account. However, as I've already committed myself and I'm not prepared to rip up the planks I've already laid, I'll leave it as it is. I might increase the number of isolated deck planks to four or even five, but I'll have to see how that looks. Another consideration is that I want solid planking beneath the upper oarsmen - I certainly wouldn't want to be sitting below a bunch of guys dripping with sweat . . . Steven

The only thing I can think of is to do an image search on tree class trawlers and see if there's enough information in those photos to get an idea of what Juniper would have looked like. Perhaps they were all built to the same design? If so, there should have been only minor differences between them. Best I can do. Steven

Getting "water" to look realistic is a very difficult goal. The first photo - the long shot - has a very lifelike look to it, with the blending of the brown at the shoreline. I look forward to seeing your progress on it. It's certainly off to a good start. Steven

Thanks everybody for all the likes, and Christos and Druxey for the kind comments. The scarph is of course conjectural, based upon the hull planking, because to the best of my knowledge no deck planks have ever been recovered from Byzantine ships. More planking. And now I'm going way out on a theoretical limb, doing something for which there is absolutely no evidence, archaeological or pictorial. But to me it seems necessary. According to Professor John Pryor, the author of Age of the Dromon, a rower needs 0.5 cubic metres of air flow per minute to enable sweat to evaporate sufficiently to keep at peak performance. For a trireme he proposes oarboxes open at the bottom and louvred decks overhead to allow this amount of airflow. Unfortunately, dromons didn't have oarboxes - the lower oars go through the sides of the vessel. Professor Pryor states that the 50 lower deck oarsmen of a dromon would need 4250 cubic metres of airflow per hour with a complete replacement of the air below decks about 30 times an hour. He proposes forced ventilation using "some contrivance such as wind sails or cowls". I've no idea how that would work in a large enough scale to achieve what he suggests. What I decided to do is make openings in the deck above the oarsmen and hope it's enough. I'm putting three deck planks 2.5mm (125mm/5") wide running the full length of the main deck each side of the centre planking, with gaps 1mm wide (50mm/2" in full scale) between them, and on either edge next to the fully planked sections, making 8 gaps in all, providing ventilation for the lower oarsmen. Here's a test run to see how it would look. (In the final form, the fully planked section would also continue to the sides of the ship). And here's the first plank going into place. I used a bit of plank on edge as a guide to form the gaps. The planks are wide enough to give good footing and a 50mm gap is narrow enough not to be a major trip hazard. Though Prof Pryor recommends that the airflow come from below I can't see any way to do this on a dromon. However, as I see it in any sort of a breeze, or even with the dromon on the move, there should be pretty decent airflow from bow to stern and from one side of the vessel to the other. I'd intended to have these openings run only as far as there were oarsmen so the maindeck at the bow would be fully decked. But I couldn't figure out how to make the transition, and the gaps would still have run almost the full length of the deck, so I ran them all the way. I'm aware this presents a risk of flooding in heavy rain, but perhaps they would have covered the gaps with tarpaulins under these circumstances. And in any kind of heavy seas a galley was so vulnerable anyway it would make straight for port, and the extra openings in the deck should make very little difference to its chances of survival in a storm. In any case, that's the best I can come up with to solve the ventilation problem.

It goes even further than that. The words Knecht and knight have the same origin, and in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066 a cniht was a servant or henchman. Mounted warriors weren't part of the Anglo-Saxon environment, and for this new idea (probably because these mounted warriors owed service to a Norman lord) they used the word for servant and called them knights. In such countries as Germany and Holland, the word kept its original meaning. As far as I know, English is the only European language that doesn't use a word connected with horses to describe a mounted warrior. Everyone else calls them something that means horseman - caballero, chevalier, ritter, ridder . . . Steven

That's the true test of a genuine fan - the bad times, not the good ones. It's easy to be a fan when your team is winning, but to stay faithful when they're losing time after time, and keep the faith no matter what, that's what it's really all about. I support (naturally enough) the West Coast Eagles. We do ok, but it's a long time since we won a Premiership. Steven

More planking: As the planks are now out past the opening for the companionway, they have a longer run. So I've put in scarph joints similar to those on the strakes. I faked the first one - I just cut the plank into two lengths with a curved line and glued it back together. But the second one is the real thing. Adding yet more planks, including completing the scarph joint: And I've made a start on the anchors. Photocopied to scale and glued to a 1mm thick sheet of brass. And cut roughly to shape. Next thing to do is file it to shape, except where I'll be leaving it a bit wide where the real anchors are a little thicker, so I can bash it a bit sideways to make it more than 1mm thick at those points.