I recently played a small part in a customer fulfilling a wish to create two Vietnamese Fishing Boats to be used as gifts to parties in Vietnam. The customer chose Billing Boats Norden Cutter kits to be transformed into the Vietnamese fishing boats. So here is what he started with:

The Norden Cutter by Billing Boat is a typical coaster of the kind which was earlier very commonly used along the Western coast of Denmark. This type of boat was originally designed by local boat builders in the villages of Klitm’¸ller and Vorup’¸r around 1930. It represented an improvement of the existing boats and has remained unchanged, except that the ship now is a few feet longer and has a closed wheel house.

Ed McDonald of www.finescalewarshipmodeling.com was commissioned to transform the kits into the Vietnamese fishing boats. Here is the end result:

An excellent link to more history of these colorful boats can be found at http://www.boatsandrice.com/index.html.