The White Plover is a fine ole riverboat, designed for the streams and rivers of Mossflower but not oceans. She was a gift from a tribe of bankvoles the north bank of the River Moss in return for rescuing their Chief from a band of plundering stoats. The Plover is made from the finest sugar maple and
shines like a honey globule because of the many layers of melted pine resin applied to her sleek, shiny sides. To maintain a good appearance, I polish
her when I have the spare time.
She has a forked stern (like a bird) and pointed bow. She has no masts, because after all the good ole White Plover is a riverboat. Instead she has three pairs of
pinewood oars about 6-7 feet long and relatively light. The ends of the oars are shaped like a plover's wings.
The riverboat is an excellent racer and can easily outstrip the average logboat or riverboat. This is partly because she's so light a fit beast can carry her on his shoulders for a long time without getting tired. The Plover is not very wide but very long and skinny, making the White Plover perfect for fitting through tight places and for the sake of speed.
I normally don't like lugging a boat around all the time, even if it's one as pretty and light as the White Plover, so I leave her with the Logalog of the Guosim Shrews when
I don't feel like sailing.
Flounder is the name I gave the very first boat I crafted when I was only a young Kitt
shipbuilding apprentice...
She wasn't much more than a hollowed out log layered with strips of birchbark. Her single mast was a young sapling with white sheets as sails.
I remember I scrawled the word Flounder (rather messily) on the side with a pointed stick.
There isn't much left to tell about it.
The Greengalley was actually a ship I stole from some Cosairs a few seasons ago,
Like most Corsair ships, the Bloodkeel (as the Corsairs called it) was
a slave galley. This one had two levels of oardecks, both with poor
starved slaves that were whipped and chained to the oars.
The crew numbered about 20 in all, led by the sadistic fox Captain Tirrak who later became my life-long arch-nemesis. The crew was away on a foraging party, leaving three on board as watch. I crept aboard the ship, gagged and bound them and threw them overboard. I hadn't reckoned on the captain still being there! We fought for a short time and I ended up chopping off his big bushy tail (which all foxes treasure highly).I pushed him over the stern, into the shallows and sailed away on my new ship (it was, in fact, my first proper ship since I made the Flounder as a Kitt).
Not very surprisingly, Tirrak swam to shore, gathered up his remaining seventeen crewbeasts, and has since then been gathering a horde to come after me and take his revenge someday.
I was little more than a Kitt then, so I didn't know any better. Captain Tirrak's doubtlessly still out there somewhere, cursing me and the loss of his beloved ship.
I freed the oarslaves and renamed the ship Greengalley, because the masts and sides were green with moss and barnacles.
I kept the Greengalley for a while until I got tired of her and stashed her in a cave as a treasure hideout (I did stash some valuable treasures in it, so I'm not telling where it's hidden).
The Kingfisher is my ole otter fishing smack, traditional of
sea otters.
She's simply the best fishing boat you can find, made out of fine beech wood and equipped with nets, maps, rods, and everything else you need to catch lots of fish.
She is a fore-and-aft rigged smack with only
one mast and a single jib. The hull is long, skinny, and light and not at all very tall.
Like all my ships, she was brushed over with a double layer of melted pine resin making her (you guessed it) extremely watertight and shiny.
The Kingfisher was painted with light blue dye and her square sails were dyed purple. She is a flat-bottomed craft with no keel to better get at the
coastal fish that range up and down the shores. She's
not very big, only about 50 or so feet long. She also has no bowsprit, forecastle, or poop.
The Kingfisher has no cabins, as she was made for short fishing trips rather than
long journeys. The best living quarters she can provide are simple but comfortable
hammocks tied to the rigging.
The Kingfisher, was made, not by me, but by a family of northland mice that my family is close friends with and expert shipbuilders like me. She was a gift for chasing off
none other than Captain Tirrak's crew, heavily armed and looking for food.
As you might know, most Corsairs and searats are highly superstitious and will tremble at the slightest mention of a ghost or so on. So I and my friends did an imitation of
the Sea Bogle (giggle) and scared them before they could stumble on and discover
the mice family's home in the caves.
I wouldn't be lying when I say Tirrak's motley crew ran like the very devil from Dark Forest was chasing them during the dead of night.
Any'ow, when the mice discovered that the crew they had been hiding from were gone, the father rewarded me and my friend with their prized beautiful fishing smack, the ole
Kingfisher itself. My friend, (sorry to say), though she's a sea otter like me,
doesn't care much for boats (very strange indeed for a sea otter) so she insisted on
me keepin' the boat.
The S.S. Resilience is a sturdy ole warship, designed for fighting at sea.
She is, in fact, a galleon, and the
biggest and heaviest of all my ships. She is
a heavily square-rigged ship with four masts and a fifth smaller mast
at the bow, supporting a lateen-rigged jib. This makes the Resilience rather faster (if only by a little) than other large ships of her size. She's made of the
strongest layers of sturdy oak and her sides are coated with a thin layer of
steel, making her immune to
arrows or fire arrows and highly resistant to floods. This is very convenient when seagoing vermin are trying to sink the Resilience by holing her with arrows and pikes. She also has a very long pointed bowsprit, which serves as a convenient ram for rippin apart an enemy ship's hull and threrfore sinking it. As I said,
the bowsprit ram is very big, about twenny feet long and half a foot wide.
Her sails are dyed sea blue, partly for good looks and mostly for
camouflage(so it's hard to see the S.S. Resilience coming from a distance if she's the same color as the sea).
The sails are made of the toughest leather and covered with a layer of thin bark.
This makes them heavy and just a little inflexible, but it also means it's almost impossible for an archer to shoot holes
in the sails. She has very few windows, and those that exist are very small and mainly used as arrow slits to fire at vermin.
She has many stores of weapons below deck, so it's just about impossible to run out of arrows or slingstones or anything of that sort.
She even has a small forge down below to sharpen weapons or make new ones.
Because the galleon is so big, she can hold tons of food supplies and so can easily
last out a battle for many days.
One large cabin below deck is devoted wholly to many maps and charts of the seas, so should the Resilience need to make a quick getaway I know exactly where the best shortcuts and hiding places are.
The S.S. Resilience is simply perfect for long voyages and journeys because of the massive amount of food, water, supplies and weapons she can hold in her hull because of her great size. As a plus, she is (as she is named) extremely
resilient to an attack or invasion of any kind by searats or Corsairs.
Her one downside is that because she's so big, it's difficult to find a place to dock her.