Longship
Ratatosk is a twenty-foot quarter-scale replica Viking Longship. She was built in Norway around ten years ago. We know very little about her early life or how she came to Britain. We found her in Formby, Lancashire, whilst putting on a show there in 2000, where she had apparently spent eight years in a craft shop window! Whilst there, during some filming work for the BBC's "Blood of the Vikings" series, we had to take her out off Formby Sands and take her onto the sea in Liverpool bay. During the trek with her across the sand dunes to be launched, a number of red squirrels(from the squirrel reserve) seemed quite interested by the unusual affair before their eyes, and followed us from a safe distance to the launching. Because of this we decided to name her 'Ratatosk' after the red squirrel that runs up and down Yggdrasil.
Although she has been built using common elements from various Scandinavian Viking age ship finds, the Gokstadt finds appear to have been the main inspiration, especially the smaller "tenders." She can be classified as a Seksarring, meaning "six oared," with provision for two oarsmen sculling, (one foreward thwart, and one and the after thwart), and two oarsmen pulling from either side of the mast on the centre thwart. In addition, she will accommodate a helmsman, and one other passenger or crewman, though due to her size, it would be pushing it a bit to add cargo to this!
Unladen she has a draught of about eight inches; fully crewed and laden, around two and a half feet with no freeboard left! She has proven to be both swift and very agile, matching the much larger vessels at Jorvik regatta for speed, (until one of the rowlocks gave way under the strain!) and turning on sceatta, superior in agility.
She has provision for sail, and is sailed regularly during the summer months whenever we can.
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