Invading Early Saxons

Well I seem unwilling to let things sit for too long. I placed an order yesterday for a pack of Essex Miniatures Dark Age boat crew. This gives me 8 oarsmen and a helmsman. Then I picked up their tiny longship.

The Essex longship has 4 rowing benches for the 8 oarsmen that are in their pack. Fiddling around on the internet I found a cool graphic of the ships found at the Skuldelev site. This graphic is pulled from this neat site: http://www.donsmaps.com/viking1.html

The Essex longship is about the size of the small cargo ship. (I found another image that showed their rowing benches but I can't find it now.) Now the Essex longship is roughly 80mm in size. I already have a Peter Pig longship. It is 6" in size (152mm roughly). It sports 14 "rowers" on 7 benches even though I grabbed the sailed one instead of the rowed one. Still a rather small ship in comparison to the Skuldelev 5 which is a small warship. That one has 13 rowing benches. So what I am looking for is at least one more longship for my growing fleet. Actually, I still want the Peter Pig Rowed ship as well.

What I will do with my small navy is still undecided. I want to use them to represent the arrival of reinforcements and change the Saxon reinforcements that show up to be based on ship's crews. So as the reputation of my Saxon lord grows, he would gain additional ships crews to his service. Its still an idea in flux.

One idea is for the scenario in one of the TFL specials which features a landing. That would be great fun in and of itself. But the thought of basing reinforcements by ships crews is what is sticking in my head. I am just not sure how they would make any appearance on a table top.