There's a protest singer singing a protest song , , , ,

Well it's taken a while, but I'm finally making some progress on the "Save the Whale!" game.  You might recall that I mentioned this one in my post entitled "A Long Spell in Drydock." If you want to refresh your memory, here's the link: https://mymodelsailingships.blogspot.com/2019/06/back-in-saddle-again.html .

I had to find some decal paper, as none of the craft stores in our area carry it any more.  So, after finding some, I printed up  my decals for the Greenpeace ships.  The one for Solo came out looking really well, and it's amazing how much of a difference it made.

The original

My model, before decals. . . 

and after.

Even I'm surprised at how much of a difference the decal made.  Now, the ship really looks finished.  Encouraged by this, I went to put the white logo on the side of Rainbow Warrior.  At this point I realized my mistake; I had bought clear decal paper, not white.  While that worked just fine on Solo, it obviously was not going to work on the other ship.  Rather than make the same mistake twice, I ordered some white paper online, and waited for it to arrive.

While Decapod's model of Rainbow Warrior on Shapeways is pretty good, I decided to modify it to more closely match the photos of the real ship.  Specifically, this photo:

After looking at this and some other pictures of the ship, I started modifying the model.  I took everything off the ship behind the superstructure.  Then, I installed a foremast and mainmast made out of .020 music wire.  This should make them resistant to breakage, and encourage gamers to be careful with them.  I made some changes to the forward deck area based on other photos not shown here, and put boats on her by using some of my GHQ small boats from sailing ships that I cut to the right length.  Finally, I used some small plastic rod to put the two square green items on the top of the wheelhouse.  Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures during the modification, but the ship went from this:

to this:

Not too bad, but she will look even better once the lettering is on the side.  It turns out that I didn't get the green of the logo to be an exact match for the hull color, but I realized at the beginning it wouldn't be perfect.

The white line below the letters is where I was not quite able to reach in with a brush and touch the edge of the decal up with green paint.  I think, though, that when I put the wake effects onto the base that will be covered.  Honestly, I'm not quite as happy about these as I was with ones for Solo.  It's still better than not having it, and it doesn't look quite as bad to the naked eye as it does here.

Of course, you can't have Greenpeace ships without the rubber boats to go with them.  As I mentioned in the earlier post, I had found some Zodiac boats on Shapeways that looked like this:

Well, they paint up pretty quickly.  The 4 I did took maybe 45 minutes tops. 

In looking at pictures of Greenpeace rubber boats (technically Rigid Inflatable Boats, or RIBs) there doesn't seem to be a standardized color scheme.  These four represent what seem to be the most common colors.  Although the black boat seems to look smaller than the others, they are all the same model.  I thought that was an interesting optical illusion.

And with that, the protest forces for my "Save the Whale!" game are done.  I guess the only question left is, "What's up with the title for this post?"  When I started the blog, I was stuck for a name, and my wife came up with what I'm using now.  Since I'm old enough to remember when "Come Sail Away" was a huge hit for the band Styx, I thought it would be funny if the post titles used lines from songs, or were a play on the lyrics.  So, I'm starting to do that with this one.  No prize for guessing who the artist and song are, because Google makes it too easy to find anything nowadays.