Flower Class Corvette HMCS Snowberry

This is a kit from Revell that my wonderful wife and good friend Johann gave me for my birthday. I converted it for radio control.The ship is 31" long. It is as close to the original as I could go with my abilities.

	HMCS Snowberry Flower Class Corvette, The Snowberry is the original ship that the kit is based on. The finished kit is about 32 inches long.
	A profile of the installation of parts. This is not to scale
	Early in construction. After installation of components. This is before the ballast was inserted & the superstructure was complete.
	The insides after completion. The deck is removable to replace batteries etc. I still had yet to Ballast the ship. This was to happen during the sea trials.
	The sea trials. Placing ballast was quite a challenge. I placed about 3 pounds of lead in side as well as the weigh of the parts. This part was trial and error. More weigh was added later, again when I found the ship hippy.
	Needless to say the ship is quite fragile. This is the case I constructed to carry the ship. It is made from recycled display shelving from Mountain Equipment Co-op. The case has a place for the transmitter and a few tools and parts.
	Maiden Voyage The Corvette cruises Saltery Bay British Columbia on it's maiden voyage. I was very careful of wind direction and made sure the tide was coming in. The water was very cold and I did not want to have to swim.
	The model powers through a turn. It has about 20 minutes of power. On it's first sea voyage it performed very well. It travelled through rough waters up to a distance of 500 feet of shore. It fared well in a duel with some ducks.
	The Snowberry departs to a patrol of Klien lake BC. After thirty minutes of fine use the rubber connector to the propeller shaft broke stalling the ship 15-20 meters off shore had to do a swimming retrieval. It was a nice day so the swim felt good. I was glad we were not at the much colder Saltery bay. I was in the water to take these photo's.
	HMCS Snowberry at full speed past the dock. The wind got up later and the ship looked proud in the waves as well as the wake of the great dog submarine. Klein lake BC.
	Four Views of the finished model on the kitchen floor. I added signal flags later that read "Laura" as she lost me for a month and a bit.

HMCS Arvida

Some useful links to information on Flower Class Corvettes

HMCS Sackville	The only remaining Flower class Corvette
Naval Museum of Manitoba	A good source of Canadian naval history including pictures of the Snowberry
U-boat net	Huge site of information on the battle of the Atlantic.