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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neil1889" data-source="post: 5913318" data-attributes="member: 100292">[sblock=OOC]jbear, if you are unhappy with this post, tell me and I'll delete it.[/sblock] For a long moment, the pall of smoke hanged over the gun port and blew inwards, rendering the enemy vessels invisible to the gun deck. Meanwhile, the round shot had belched forth and aimed true by Kartuus, it had bounced off the ocean's surface like a skipping pebble and smashed through the target junk's hull near the prow, just as the lugsail had presented her bow to the Singing Dolphin in the midst of a turn of her own. After first blasting through the junk's hull, the missile then crashed through several of the interior bulkheads that such vessels as these were built with. Splinters were sent flying like a form of shrapnel, maiming and dismembering in their own right. Still not yet spent, the ball impacted against the below-deck section of a mast and ricoched off to cause yet more mischief... Back on the Singing Dolphin, the smoke had started to clear from the around the gun deck enough to see a mast suddenly slowly topple over the junk's portside. The damaged mast had suddenly been unable to support the load exerted on it by the pressure of the wind and tautness of its own rigging. It broke apart and toppled, the lower boom slamming down hard on the deck as parts of rigging, sails and topmen crew fell from above, sometimes over the side, sometimes not. The lower mast section, once hidden below, suddenly burst through the upper deck planking, adding to the general mayhem as the tumble of spars and sail crashed over the portside rail. The junk wallowed in its misery as the cast-down rigging held the tumbled spars to the ship and then, the sails in the water began to act as a dragging sea-anchor.</blockquote>

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