Browsing through the local marketplace pages I was smitten by an advertisement for an old model boat hull – …………….!

When I was growing up, I was introduced to model boats with a beautiful little pond yacht, built by my father whilst on holiday in Tenby. We would holiday there every year as a family, staying with my grandparents, my grandfather being a master carpenter at Pembroke Dock and later in the town. The yacht was carved out of a solid block of pine, and fitted with a keel made from an old beach spade! The mast and boom was cut and planed from a piece of an old deck-chair and the sails were sewn by my grandmother, a true family affair! It served my sister and I for many years, until it vanished during a house move, never to be seen again.

Later I was given a Keil-Kraft Triton, as a Christmas present, and the modeling bug was well and truly caught! The Triton lasted for over ten years, until being swept over a weir in Sudbury, after the batteries failed during an afternoon session. Plastic kits and aeroplanes also featured in my youth and later into adulthood, alongside model railways, and whatever else my two sons were into. At one time or another there was always a kit or a build going on, but I always wanted to build something substantial, but always the costs eluded me, though I continued to browse the catalogues and peer longingly into model shops, just in case!

In 1967 I joined the Royal Air Force as a photographer and, in 1969 was posted to Malta, until we pulled out in 1972, after we were declared redundant by the Maltese government! As we were packing up, I was asked by one of the other guys, also a modeler of sorts, if I knew anyone who wanted a part built model boat, a 48" RAF Crash Tender! Did I, and the deal was done. The hull, spare wood and some fittings changed hands for £20 – an absolute fortune for a junior airman in those days. It was carefully packed into a box made from an old packing case and loaded onto the Hercules to be taken to Scicily, and eventually on to the UK, some six months later. All our possessions were placed into storage until our final posting was decided, and that was the last that I saw of my Crash Tender! Where it went to I never found out. End of boat modeling for the next 20 years!

A change of circumstances, career and wife, led to a rekindling of the creative side and having a fully equipped workshop all to myself, and my students, was all I needed to get building again. My school workshop buzzed with activity, building cars, planes, rockets, and the occasional submarine, some of which dived and some which came back up again! We CNC'd, vac-formed and later 3-D printed pretty much anything that caught our fancy. The school wargames club had the best range of cast pewter figures you could imagine! There was always something to build, or make, but that old hankering for a big boat kit was always there, but now the costs are even bigger! And then – there it was, on the screen, no pictures, but who cares, it was a Sea Queen! A quick message to secure, and it was ready to collect. This is what I had acquired –

Yes Paul, I was aware of the Cascamite bug, made even more so if it wasn't mixed properly! I will be using some polyurethane to fix any new materials, can be a bit foamy, but I have actually glued a shower-tub into a bathroom with it before now, with great success, but that's another story!

I'll secure the existing joints with glass tape and epoxy, a la Mirror dinghy style, but without the copper wire unless the joint line has actually started to fail, and go from there. Fingers crossed!