Seas the day

If sailing vessels are your jam, then Simon Pickard has a treat for you. This LEGO microscale galleon packs an impressive amount of detail and shaping, making great use of sloped brick to form both the hull and sails. I like how a round 1×1 plate with bar is combined with a clip plate to give the spirit sail a rakish angle. The display stand is pretty swanky as well. I’ve always been a fan of using the turntable base as a design element, and the varied shades of blue work well to make the sea of 1×1 round plate in transparent blue really pop.

Microscale Galleon

This isn’t the first nautical creation by Simon we’ve featured. The last one was minifigure scaled. Will the next one be micro-micro scale? How small a boat can you make out of LEGO?

4 comments on “Seas the day

  1. Purple Dave

    I worked for a boatbuilder in high school, but he pretty much only dealt with open hull wooden boats that you could launch from a trailer, and the resort town where I grew up didn’t yet have its resident tall ship, so I never really learned the terminology for square rigged tall ships. Mike also wasn’t a very captainy captain (and I wasn’t a very sailory sailor), so I only learned a fairly random assortment of terminology pertaining to fore-and-aft rigged sailboats. So I got curious about “spirit sail”. I’m guessing “autocorrect” didn’t like spritsail? Regardless, there are two completely different types of spritsail, but the one that’s used on square rigged tall ships is a square sail like you’d see stacked on the masts, but hanging below the bowsprit. If it was above the bowsprit and angled upwards fore-to-aft, it’d be a jib. The Greeks had a foresail called an “artemon” that was triangular and slung below a bowsprit (though it hung by one point and had two sheets that apparently allowed it to be used to steer the vessel more than help propel it), but I can’t find any evidence that square-rigged tall ships ever used one (indeed, as the masts were loaded up with more sails, the space beneath the bowsprit ended up being more valuable for rigging that countered the tension of the forestays, rather than hanging a tiny scrap of cloth that would invariably be hiding behind the hull). Probably because of how rare they became later on, I can’t find any photos of a struck spritsail to see if the spritsail yard pivots to run parallel to the bowsprit when not in use. However, there is one other possibility. Early on, there was netting above the bowsprit that would be used to stow the headsails. At some point, that netting ended up being moved below the bowsprit, where it’s now sometimes referred to as the “cadet strainer” because it doubled as a safeguard against falling overboard when working on the bowsprit. So that could still be one or more jibs, just stowed rather than raised. If it’s none of those, then I have no idea what it’s supposed to be.

  2. Chris Doyle Post author

    @Mark Yeah, not much construction involved there, though. ;)
    I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a three-part micro-mirco of a sailboat at some point, but there’s probably a two-part solution out there, too.

  3. Purple Dave

    @Mark:
    Ceci n’est pas une boat.

    @Chris Doyle:
    1×2 jumper plate for the hull, with 87747 Barb / Claw / Horn – Large as a Bermuda-rig sail. I just remembered I designed that so I could include a sailboat in the distance for a diorama of my hometown’s lighthouse that I want to build someday. It’s perspective-dependent, though, as the sail only looks right from a narrow range of angles.

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