Last of the Athenian trireme Admirals?

There's an obituary in the Times for Sir Charles Willink, one of the group that accurately reconstructed a classic Athenian trireme:

The trireme (in Greek trieres) was the ship that built the Athenian Empire. It is the heart of pine in the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. With it the small Athenian fleet drove the great Persian armada of Xerxes from the Mediterranean at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC. But how the trireme worked was a mystery.

It was a long rowing-ship with a square sail. Its principal weapon was a bronze ram, fixed on the prow at the waterline. The heyday of the trireme was the 5th century BC, when the finest practitioners of trireme warfare were the Athenians, who perfected the art of turning at speed to ram and disable enemy ships, and the maneouvre of diekplous to break the enemy line.

But apart from conflicting descriptions, vase paintings, sculptures and coins, no one knew how the trireme worked, or believed that it could have been rowed as fast as its ancient spinners alleged. The scholars calculated 7 knots maximum.

The Great Times Trireme Controversy was initiated by a feature article by Eric Leach in The Times on August 30, 1975. Instead of taking the trireme as ancient literature, it asked practical questions. Where did the oarsmen sit? How was the trireme built? How fast did it move? How long was a long day’s sailing?

H/T to Eric Kirkland for the link.