2025 A Year in Port Polar Bear

Port Polar Bear Memorial Weekend Battle Sat/Sun May 24, 25 2024

We battled Saturday and Sunday before Memorial Day. In attendance were: Tyler (Barham/Derfflinger 2), McCoy (QE), Etta (Minneapolis, Tourville), Bob (Nagato), Zach (Nagato), Andy (Nagato), Mike (Seydlitz), Peter (Erin), Matthew (Seydlitz), Owen (Moltke), Tom (WW1 Montana), Rick (Jamaica). Brandon (Caio Duilio) came in from Reno. Chris Pearce (Furutaka) came Texas stopping in Missouri to pick up Kevin Bray (Moltke).

As is typical, we split teams various ways throughout the weekend trying to keep things both equitable and variable. We did three full two sortie battles on Saturday and on Sunday we did a two sortie battle followed by a 3 sortie battle. Flag team won every battle except for the 3rd on Saturday which was a very narrow margin.

Kevin Bray has been out of the hobby for roughly 10 years. It was good to see him getting back. He wasn’t quite ready for the first sortie on Saturday but put his new Moltke in harms way for the rest of the weekend.

Brandon’s Caio Duilio received some bow water channeling upgrades and seemed to perform well throughout the weekend.

Tyler had the Barham out for the first time since 2018, 7 years ago. Technically Hudson had battled it somewhere in there but for the most part it had been collecting dust in the interim. The plan is to have McCoy in his brand new QE be wingmen with his dad for nats this year. McCoy did very well just noticing that there are some acceleration differences compared to the VU, but he appreciated how much more damage it could take. The old Barham dove in to punish Matthew’s Seydliz who was stranded on shore during the first battle, second sortie on Saturday and ended up catching a stick in the props. This fried the drive train and Tyler had to run the Derfflinger 2 for the rest of the day, finding that that ship probably needs some more bow water channeling. Similarly on Sunday the QE was working great right until it called 5 at end of the the 2^nd sortie of the first battle when electrical gremlins won the day, ultimately forcing the switch back to the Derf2.

Mike wasn’t taking damage like we were all used to, turns out the distance from the restrictor to the outlet was too short.

Peter had a gun upgrade over the winter, it took a little shaking out but ended up performing well.

A new prospective captain Brenton came for much of Sunday, he drove the Shannon around.

It sounds like most of the crew is planning to head to Nats in North Carolina next month. With a quick turnaround of just 4 weeks, we better start getting the ships ready.