We were again
invited to participate this year. As
Boathouse No. 4 was being re-furbished, the Model displays were ‘distributed’
round the site and we were allocated an area at the rear of the
café/restaurant. This allowed us to
change the way we displayed the models and opinion at the end of the event was
it was the best layout we had achieved. We
had a good range of models from Mark Hawkins WW1 Amazon, Dreadnought and
After a bit of ‘discussion’, the
Navy agreed to let us park our vehicles in the actual Dockyard. This was necessary as they had opened HMS
Daring (at least little bits of it!) to the public which meant we could not get
access to our normal car park next to HMS Victory. It all worked well. We had to provide extra details of attendees,
cars etc. as photo passes were needed to use the Naval Dockyard.
The major displays on the water were scheduled
to be put on by the two Portsmouth Clubs and the SWA, unfortunately the weather
did not co-operate,
the main problem being wind strength and direction. In the end all displays were either
curtailed or cancelled because of the dangerous conditions, tug models seemed
to survive best. We managed to get HMS
Agincourt, HMS Southampton and the PT Boat on the
water on Saturday but nothing on Sunday when the wind was stronger and gusting.
All was not
lost as several of our members were able to see over HMS Daring, main complaint
being they did not see much!!
The organisation by the Historic
Dockyard Events Team ably led by Terri Hall was, as usual, first class.
Attendees
this year were John
Edwards, Colin Watson, Roy
Skeates, Ken Winter, David Reith, David McNair-Taylor, Charles Davis, Mark Hawkins and myself. We had over 30 models on display but only
managed three of them on the water. We
had a lot of people through during the two days and fielded a fair number of
questions about the models.
John Hawley