Got into 17th Century naval history because of wargaming

In late 1989, I was looking for a new topic to research to support wargaming. I had spent much of the last 20 years studying the War in North Africa, as well as the broader war in Europe. I focused on mechanized warfare, tanks, and artillery. I had expected that there would be sufficient information about the Spanish Armada campaign and ships to pursue that, but that proved to be not the case. Instead, I stumbled onto Archibald's book: THE WOODEN FIGHTING SHIP IN THE ROYAL NAVY AD 897 - 1860. What particularly caught my interest was the period from 1642 to 1660. I started looking for more sources and first found David Howarth's book Man of War. A year or two later, I found The First Dutch War and then The Royal Navy: a History from the Earliest Times to the Present (the 1890's). By then, I was hooked. After meeting Frank Fox, I took his advice and looked for a way to access data from the Dutch archives. "The rest is history" so to speak.