For those of you contemplating the Billings St Roch, here are some pictures which may prove helpful. Please be sure to purchase your Billings kit directly from the Vancouver Maritime Museum and visit the original ship. The ship and the museum need your support as they are a non-profit organisation! The following summary comes from that web site.

"The RCMP schooner St. Roch was the first ship to travel the treacherous Northwest passage in both directions, as well as the first ship to ever circumnavigate North America. St. Roch was built in 1928 as a supply ship for isolated, far-flung Arctic RCMP detachments. St. Roch navigated the Northwest Passage from west to east between 1940 and 1942 becoming the first ship to do so and only the second ship to ever travel the Passage. In 1944, St. Roch travelled the more northerly route of the Northwest Passage from east to west, becoming the first ship to do so in both directions. St. Roch was retired in 1948, and was sent to Halifax by way of the Panama Canal in 1950. This voyage made St. Roch the first ship to circumnavigate North America. St. Roch came to Vancouver as a museum ship in 1954, and was brought ashore in 1958. The ship acquired a permanent indoor home and was restored to her 1944 appearance by Parks Canada in 1966."

As to the Billings kit? The model builds into a wonderful model, but to be honest it is not the world's greatest kit. I greatly enjoyed building it however. The kit's lines seem to be ok, and the plans reasonably accurate. However, the are some notable errors, for example a snow sled on deck appears on the kit as a hatch cover offset to starboard! Another notable item missing is the ice protection in the form of hull plates around the bow. But again to be fair Billings could not have included this in the kit as anyone planking the hull even slightly differently would not be able to get a preformed bow to fit perfectly. They should have included them on the plans though, and mentioned that the plates needed to be added. I had a lot of success adding these plates with some thin sheet styrene, and pressing the "rivets" out from the inside using a sewing marking wheel.

The instructions on this kit are well below the standards most of us are used to, and I had to rely on the plans to complete the kit. I was also very lucky to have the original down the road to check on details. For some reason the Dutch instructions were two to three times longer than the English ones, and I had more success reading those than relying on the English ones.