wefalck wrote:
Maarten, I was wondering, whether the 'Reddningsmuseum' in Den Helder wouldn't have had any plans. As far as I remember from my only visit back in 2008 or so they have three 'real' boats in their collection, one of them afloat.
The German rescue organisation is the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffbrüchiger (DGzRS) founded in 1865 in Bremen. Their current Web-site is:
https://www.seenotretter.de/en/.
They used to have plans for their more recent boats that could be obtained through the Web-site. Over the last 150 years they used a wide variety of types of boats, starting with rowing and sailing ones. The type of boats depended and depends on the environments in which they are meant to operate. There are special boats for the Wadden Sea and boats that are to be launched from the beaches of the Baltic, etc. Some of the types are similar to the Dutch ones and others were inspired by the British Life-Boat Association.
I am mainly interested in the early rowing and sailing ones and perhaps the very early motorised ones. The rowing ones are interesting, as they are built using the so-called Francis-system, i.e. from hydraulically shaped steel panels - looking from the outside like clinker-built boats. The launching carriages were originally drawn by a team of eight and later by tracked tractors built by Lanz. At least three of the boats are preserved (one in the Maritime Museum Bremerhaven, the others in their original sheds around the country). There is also one of the early sailing boats in the museum in Bremerhaven. Plans for the rowing boats and carriages are in Pâris' 'Souvenirs' and I have numerous pictures of a couple of boats in the museums.
Well, I gather the German boats also rescued quite a few Dutch, who got into trouble ...
Hi Wefalck,
Yes, I assume that will be equally true of course! And the DGzRS is an equally respectable organisation. I think it is quite fortunate Revell took effort to create a number of kits of DGzRS boats. But as these are only of recent and current types, it would by equally nice to see some of the older historical types, as you mention the rowing and sailing types from the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries.
It's also nice to compare: whilst the German DGzRS focused mainly on larger "Rescue cruisers" (Rettungskreuzer), and the British RNLI on larger boats with displacement hulls, whilst on the other hand the Dutch KNRM have now fully focused on RHIBs providing great speed in the first place. It's my intention to provide also one, maybe two of the latter in kitform. The smallest of these, the Valentijn class, will provide nice comparison to the new German Verena, now in use as the new satellite boat (Tochterboot) of some of the larger cruisers. In the Netherlands, these Valentijn boats are used as trailer launched beach rescue boats, just as their predecessors from the Eierland class.
My chum Jaap Woort had checked with the Reddingsmuseum indeed, but they provided him only with the plan of the welded steel boats from the President Steyn class, telling him these were having the same hull plan. Well, they are close and even based on the wooden boats, but their dimensions are different and the details are even further divers. Six of these steel boats were built in the late thirties and early forties, but these were not very satisfactory and all were decommisioned by 1960, and replaced -- by new wooden boats of the old design!
So I am very happy I could get this plan from the 'Stichting Kurt Carlsen', enabling my project.