ou may have seen Deryck Foster's marine paintings hanging at the Commissioner's House in Dockyard, but you probably missed some of his other work there ? ratline repair.

Mr. Foster, British artist and former resident of Bermuda, was on the Island this month. Instead of hanging out on the beach or photographing the Birdcage like most visitors, he decided to spend his time repairing the Island's model ships.

On Wednesday, Lifestyle's reporter Jessie Moniz visited Mr. Foster and his wife Denise shortly before they left Bermuda to return to their home in Uppingham, Rutland, England.

"The most difficult part to repair are the ratlines," said Mr. Foster. "They are the pieces of rigging that the crew used to clamber up. They are called ratlines for rats to run up. On the model they are very very fine and they are to scale. To get them to stay in place really was the most awful bother.The rigging is made out of nylon and dacron."

Mr. Foster's patients include models of ships like and the which have been damaged over time.

"How do you fix them? With great difficulty," said Mr. Foster making a face. "They are a real fiddle."

Only certain parts, anchors, guns, and grating tops for the deck were mail-ordered whole, everything else had to be constructed from more basic materials.

While in Bermuda, Mr. Foster has been helping their daughter and son-in-law to renovate a house, and he has also been working on a scale model of a ship belonging to privateer Hezekiah Frith.

"That model is my estimate of what Hezekiah Frith's fourth sloop looked like. It was built in 1790. Hezekiah Frith was a prominent Bermuda citizen. He use to go on semi-piratical ventures to sea and took a lot of ships. He worked under letters of marque from the admiralty to go out to sea and take villains' ships. Year by year he built bigger and bigger vessels. This was his last vessel. It was more or less a copy of a British Man-O-War with 18 guns."

Mr. Foster said to build a model ship like , you have to have plans. He is making the ship for his son-in-law, Col. Sumner Waters who lives at Spithead, the house where Hezekiah Frith once lived. My son-in-law is going to make a glass case for it. It will be in his house."

Mr. Foster is fanatical about detail and historical accuracy. To get everything to his liking he had to do a tremendous amount of research.

"I don't know how much this model of the would be worth," he said. "It is not what they call museum quality, which would be beautifully finished it might have been as much as 8,000 ? 10,000 pounds. I would class this as about fifty-five per cent museum quality. I am just an amateur.

He took up model ships when he retired from painting a few years ago.

"I started out by buying a kit," he said. "When I started I found that the models had historical mistakes that I had to correct, because I don't like it if it is wrong. Then I thought, why don't I do it myself. I found somewhere where you could buy all the planks and little bits and stuff. That was probably about four years ago."

Mr. Foster has always had a love of the ocean. Throughout most of his life his passion for sailing and painting were almost interchangeable.

"Now, in my later years, I am flyfishing instead of sailing, and making model ships instead of painting pictures of them," he said, "in particular, models of Bermuda ships I know so well, from 1609 to 1890."

A challenge from a fellow sailor first brought Mr. Foster to Bermuda in 1972.

"I was first invited to come to Bermuda in 1972 by a prominent Bermudian sailor," said Mr. Foster. "He reckoned that the sunlight on sails and the water is especially difficult to catch with oil paints on canvas, so it was a challenge to me as that is the very effect I always tried to capture."

His love for Bermuda was immediate, and he became fascinated by the island's maritime history.

"I have had an interest in the restoration of the Maritime Museum in Dockyard from its very early days, and last May was honoured to see a good many of my paintings beautifully lit and hung in the dining room at the restored Commissioner's House," he said. "I was particularly delighted to have been invited to come to Bermuda this winter to work as one of their volunteers, repairing some of their archive collection of model ships. I feel I am repaying in a small way some of Bermuda's kindness and hospitality to me."

Mr. Foster is 81-years-old. After war-time service in the Royal Airforce, he attended art school in London. In 1960, he opened his own picture gallery in Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. He also became a member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

He moved to Bermuda in 1977 and left ten years later. After a year spent on the Spanish island of Mallorca, he moved back to the United Kingdom for good.