Chickasaw Bluffs: River assault boats

Boat 1 with 6 pound boat gun.  Strictly gunfire support material

Yes, it's been a while since my last post.  I'm truly sorry.  I seem to have hit some sort of blogger wall.  It's not that I'm doing nothing, I'm painting almost every night.  I haven't been playing many games and that does lighten the number of posts I can make, unless I devote myself to boring navel gazing.

A look further astern.  That's a Lewis and Clark figure on the stern.  Makes a good squad leader.

I'm still working on units for Chickasaw Bluffs and I'm nearly done with them. I sixty Perry militia figures and I'm down to the last twenty to wrap up.  I'd hoped to have them done over Spring Break last week, but no such luck.  Soon.  Unfortunately, tomorrow I leave for the National Student Journalism convention.  This year it's just up the road in Seattle, so I don't lose a day to travel.

A nice shot down the stem of the boat.

While I was doing some tedious blacklining on my figures I decided to take a break and paint up a couple of the small boats needed for my river landing at Chickasaw Bluffs.  I'm using four of the Merrimac shipyards boats.  These come two to a box.  I bought them about four years ago as a member of the Old Glory Army.  They were very inexpensive, I wanna say ten dollars for two with the discount.  The boats come with a ton of goodies-oars and oarlocks, boat howitzers and swivel guns.  A great value for the price.

A shot at boat two with the three swivels

I chose to make the swivel guns of iron rather than brass.  Thought that might be more the norm on the frontier.

 For the game, these are simply assault vessels, landing craft.  They'll join the keelboat and my two Lewis and Clark as landing craft, dropping troops on to the shore.  I decided to army these two vessels differently, going for a 6 lb. boat gun on one with a bunch of blunderbuss armed swivels on the other. I just added some masts out of plastruct and away we go.

A quick comparison shot of the two boats.