The Nautical Research Guild’s annual conference for 2020 is cancelled due to COVID issues, but they recently announced that they will be holding their annual membership meeting after all, only it will be a virtual meeting. Members will be able to attend the meeting from the safety and comfort of their own homes. The meeting, normally part of the conference, is scheduled to take place on Saturday, December 5th, at 11am Central / 9am Pacific.

The NRG is now asking members to RSVP, so they can plan on how much they need to upgrade their video conferencing service. Attending the membership meeting is free to all members, but it sounds like the NRG itself will need to pay for the upgraded service.

I haven’t seen any of this information actually posted on the NRG website yet. So, if you’re a member, please make sure to contact the main office with your…

I’ve been waiting for this one. If you’ve been following my blog, or even if you’ve just been keeping on top of ship modeling news, you probably know that Model Expo has started a new line of model boat kits in a series of progressive model building tutorials. These kits are designed by one of the best ship modelers of our time, David Antscherl,  who is also the author of several ship modeling books.

I’ve just spotted the second kit of the series in an email ad from Model Expo, the Norwegian Sailing Pram.

This kit is classed as an “Intermediate” kit, but I think that term is relative, since so many square rigged sailing ship model kits are called Intermediate as well. But, it is designed to be the second build, after the completion of the earlier released Lowell Grand Banks Dory kit. For those who have never built a…

These days, It’s pretty tough on ship model clubs, not being able to gather together to swap model making stories. But, like other groups across the country, the South Bay Model Shipwrights recently tested out meeting using video conferencing. Zoom has practically become a household word now, though there are other systems available.

This past Thursday, the group had its first test meeting, which I was involved in. It was the first time I had seen some of my ship modeling friends in months, so it was a nice virtual gathering. Being a test meeting, it was just a subset of the whole club, but it wasn’t really all that much smaller than many of the physical meetings.

There were a few glitches to iron out, but overall it was a success. The main issue may be in the use of the free Zoom meeting accounts, which allow only 40…

While the Nautical Research Guild conference was supposed to take place this Fall. It was canceled some time ago due to the unknowns of the Corona Virus outbreak. But, if things manage to improve over the next year, and let’s hope they actually do, the next NRG conference will then take place October 21 – 23, 2021.

The venue is unchanged, still set to take place at the Channel Islands Maritime Museum in Oxnard, California. No other details have been announced, but the event is more than a year away. Probably, more information will be available about this time next year.

This should give all you ship modelers some time to finish the awesome project you want to display at the event. Since the museum is one of my old haunts, we’ll before they moved anyway, and it’s just a drive down the coast from here, I expect I’ll try…

With so many people staying at home these days, the stocks of ship model kits at Ages of Sail, particularly the newest kits, seem to come and go faster than ever.

OcCre’s newest release is the schooler Polaris, which bears a striking resemblence to Artesania Latina’s pilot boat Swift kit, was introduced and sold out in less than a month, though I’m told that a further shipment has come in, so they may be available again at the time of this writing.

About the same time they started selling the Polaris, Ages of Sail started carrying the new Vanguard Models kits, and there too, the HMS Speedy kit turned out to be more popular than expected and is now out of stock at Ages of Sail.

HMS Flirt – Vanguard Models

But Chris Watton, who’s the one-man development machine of Vanguard Models, has been working hard at getting…