In my efforts to set the stage for my upcoming book, The Diary of Phineas Caswell, I’ve been reworking the lovely Black Falcon plastic pirate ship kit ito both look like the Kathryn B, the true hero of the novel, and to accommodate 1/87 scale figures.

In the novel, Kathryn B is about 100 feet long. The Black Falcon, my copy was made by a Czech company called Smer, works out to about 70. A wee bit of stretching was required to make Kathryn B out of Black Falcon.

So, what to do, what to do? Well, instead of hacking the model ship’s hull through the midsection and fabricating 30 scale feet of plastic with the proper tumblehome and wales and internal ribbing, I decided just to make a picture of what she would look like. I hope you enjoy them, and that they inspire to write a novel, too!

This little tiny who’s-who of ship parts shows you pretty much where I added length to her. There’s about ten feet forward of the foremast. Looking at it now, it looks kind of weird. And then there’s another twenty feet forward of the mainmast. And no guns in the waist. It’s important to the story, but looks a little odd in the light of time.

A cool thing about sailing ships, however, is that, although they were designed to general standards, no two were ever alike. And shipwrights tried just about every combination of deck length and masting plan and sail plan to come up with something efficient. So, an odd looking duck like the Kathryn B could very well have sailed the seas. Just not attractively…

Tales of the Black Falcon is part of the John D Reinhart content family. Writer, illustrator, videographer, and accidental filmmaker — find the whole story at JohnDReinhart.com.

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