A famous ship in a bottle

The weather today is truly horrendous and so I am reduced to a rather grainy, indoor photograph of an old maritime tradition, a ship in a bottle.

This is no ordinary ship however, but a model of the 16 m ketch Gypsy Moth IV. The vessel was commissioned by Sir Francis Chichester to sail single-handed around the world, trying to match the times set by the 19th century clipper ships. He left Plymouth on 27 August 1966 and returned there on 28 May 1967, having circumnavigated the globe, with one stop, in Sydney, Australia.

The model was made in 1967 in Peterhead, Scotland and, appropriately enough, it was put into an old whisky bottle.