Hi Carl (@clipper): Today was a really nice day to be out. I was at my daughter's house waiting for a new washer to be delivered. That was a fun 4 hours. As far as wind goes, it is probably the same in a boat as it is flying an airplane. If there is a crosswind, you have to turn the nose a degree or two into the wind to hold a heading. If you slow down, like during final approach, you have to turn the nose into the wind even more to compensate for the loss of speed. I am sure the higher the sides of your boat, the more effect the wind has on it.

After a few weeks of working on other things, I got a bit more done on the San Francisco build. As I have been endeavoring to do from the beginning, I am trying to build from the inside out on this so that I reduce the risk of damaging completed work while trying to put something new into place. This is not always easy to do, or more accurately, not always easy to know what to do next.

In this case, the work is the two funnels in the center of the hull. The choice to do these next was fairly easy, and the next choice will be the 5" gun mounts on both sides of the funnels.

Building these funnels was a bit challenging in that they required some semi circular ramps to be glued to the sides and a small grille of sorts on the top. The grill had to be bent at the ends to fit the funnel tops. The kit plastic for these is molded solid so using the PE parts from the detail set are a no brainer in this regard.

One potential problem popped up when I thought that the ammo cases I had previously glued to the deck surrounding the funnels, looked like they would interfere with the funnel placement, but it turned out okay. The cases are probably too close, but I felt that removing them would have caused more damage that leaving them as is.

Thanks John (@j-healy). I just work on this now in small doses because I am finding the PE work to be difficult at times and I don't want to get burned out. But it is nice to get things like these funnels done because they add to the look overall.

Looking better and better, Carl (@clipper). On a project like this, where there is so much to do, it is important to pace yourself through the build. It looks like it would be easy to build something that interferes with something that follows. Ammo boxes look perfect.