No, not THAT HMS Victory, obviously...
We were contacted by a nice lady from the Shore Establishment HMS Collingwood in Gosport ( Or Fareham, one or the other!), asking if we would be interested in having a go at a restoration job. We have done a couple of these in the past for the navy and actually came highly recommended
. So we tootled off to Collingwood, through security and to an old drill hall, replete with rope equipment, old tents and that smell of old drill hall. Lurking at the end of the hall was this....
It was 12' long on a base 38" wide, clearly it was not going to fit in our clubhouse and the work would need to be done on site. Quite a lot of work in fact!
The masts had been damaged and patched up a number of times, spars were missing, bits of ship were rolling around on deck, it had an 'interesting' interpretation of the real ships 'black and buff', plus it had stern decoration straight off of a wedding cake!
We said yes, a bid was made and we sat back and waited...