B is for ♪♪ "Bobbin' Along on the Crest of a Wave ♪♪ . . . .

. . . . Shit! Whitewater! Hold on to yer'hat pardner!"

A funny one really, I was looking for something to break-up the FFL/Arab posts, and started scrolling through Picasa, hoping to find a near-ready 'quickie', found a couple of raft shots in another place and though "Funnny, they should be in the raft folder" . . . but then couldn't find the raft folder? I had intended to publish the raft post over Christmas, so I guessed I might have, searched the C:Drive and found it in the 'Waiting Sorting' folder on the desktop, where it would be, if I'd posted it.

However, there was no blurb Text.docx, and I hadn't finished cropping the images, so I checked the Blog . . . nothing! I must have picked it up accidentally with a finished post from the desktop (where it was last time I remember it!) and dropped it in 'waiting'? What else is in there though, because often when you do a boo-boo like that you collect several folders/files in the invisible net, I'll have to have a careful check?

So, with the extra images, now all cropped, and months (years) late, here's the 'Rafts & Log' portion of the 'Canoe Season' (which is still in the long queue, but it got more work tonight (3rd), it's going to be at least 14 posts?), a bit of a cheat, as more than two-thirds of the season has come from Brian Berke, while this is all from my stash, but it will all happen fairly in the end!

Britains' raft; the Flagship of Herald's fleet! If I recall correctly it wasn't a good floater, the raft being a chunky lump of polyethylene, you could get it to sit steady in still water, but any roughness and it tended to go over! the punter's pole is snapped short, but they are hard to find in one piece, so at least I have a longish piece

A young collection, my sample doesn't do justice to the variations of plastic and paint colour out there, you can find quite pale rafts, darker rafts, bright orange baggage &ct. Some (early versions?) had the spigots on the figures feet/knees and receiving holes in the raft which was - frankly - the better system, as these reverse locating ones tend to lose the studs as I have on the left-hand one, something which plagued the canoes of both Britains and Timpo.

Timpo's log raft; not much else one can say, compatible with 3rd/4th generation cowboys (?) and pretty common - several dealers have shop-stock to dip into - it's a nice, novelty plaything which also enhances a Wild West collection. I think it came with a wire keel/weight for floating like the canoes, but the boys always get their feet wet!

Timpo also did a more comprehensive raft, but of the 'daft raft race' type, cobbled together from logs, broken planks and barrels, it's the sort of thing Timmy, the two Wayne's and I nearly won with, in 1984 - there was a lot of cheating, involving bare-legs and a divers knife!

I've seen them with two standing, one standing and one squatting cowboy, or this one with a pair of kneeling cavalry legs, mine is a poor sample as the non-punting passenger is clearly panicking and needs pre-float, aversion therapy! Hold on! I think I can hear him . . .

"Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!  It's the Plastic Warrior show in less than two weeks and we're still half-way up the Rio Grande! Punt harder! We're gonna' miss it!"

The people who do those one-cardboard-building-per-bag, swoppet piracies, also copied the Timpo raft! Here imported by Oto S.p.A. into Italy, but you find them as generics too. It comes with two sacks instead of the sack/trunk combo' of the original, and you also get a Timpo tree copy, albeit with rather sparse foliage! Note also that the top deck is parallel boughs, rather than planks, so they ex-kape a lawsuit!

Strangely most sets with this header-cad have crappy 3^rd/4^th generation copies of other Hong Kong knock-off swoppets, but the two job-specific figures in this set are quite good, being the keeling and squatting legs you don't often find in HK swoppet samples!