The velvety gray shape slipped silently into the waters of Pushaw Lake one recent Saturday as a small crowd gathered to watch.

It was Bill Terra’s battleship – a model so large that, from a distance and without landmarks to compare with it, some might mistake it for the real thing.

Terra, who piloted the 28-foot Admiral Graf Spee effortlessly along the shoreline, was hailed at just about every private dock on the lake, so it took a long time to make the circuit back to Gould’s Landing. At each dock, Terra said he was plied with drinks and questions about the model, and was even invited to join an exclusive club of lakeside dwellers.

The scale model is imposing and big enough for a pilot and passenger, but Terra was alone on this particular outing, hidden beneath the main deck, between the ship’s towers.

Questions follow him wherever he goes with the model. “What is it?” “How long did it take to build?” and “Why?” were just a few of the questions asked as people converged to watch him launch the ship and put it through its maneuvers.

The 1:22 scale model has a “smudge pot” in the main stack to re-create the smoke that the original ship’s diesel engines produced. Power is provided by a 15-horsepower outboard cleverly concealed inside the hull. Usual cruising speed is 10 mph, but the Spee can do 17 or more.

The real Graf Spee had a short but illustrious career. It was one of Germany’s “pocket battleships,” called panzerschiffe, limited to 10,000 tons by the 1919 Versailles Treaty. The Spee was not really a full-fledged battleship by World War II standards and its failure in the south Atlantic would prove that the “pocket battleships” were not up to the demands of sea warfare, despite the brilliant leadership of the Spee’s captain, Hans Wilhelm Langsdorf. After sinking many Allied merchant ships in the 1930s, the Spee had a run-in with British warships in the Battle of the River Plate in South American waters.

The Graf Spee put the Exeter out of action, damaged the Ajax and the Achilles but also received damage during the battle. The Spee’s captain went to port for repairs at Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 1939. Forced to go to sea before repairs were complete, Langsdorf scuttled the battleship off the South American coast to avoid capture by Allies.

Terra had built a smaller radio-controlled model of the Spee, which sits in his basement workshop, an inspiration for him to build the bigger one, one piece at a time, from the keel to the antennae atop the towers. Under the gray skin of the Spee is “a stick-built canoe shaped like a battleship,” Terra said of his creation that was built from scratch. He is quick to admit that 150 details remain to be added to the model, saying, “It’ll take another year to complete.”

The wooden decking looks like it was put together one plank at a time, lovingly hand-fitted, sanded and finished – because it was. The three years that it has taken to put the ship together have been part of an obsession but Terra longs for those days before the project. “I’ll get my life back,” he says of that time when the project is done.

Terra has shown the ship many times to friends who visit Levant, and usually it has been in his basement garage bay as one detail or another begins to take shape, products of innovative use of items never meant to become part of a ship model – one part hard work, one part design from original drawings, and one part plain old Yankee ingenuity.

Terra often pauses between puffs on hand-rolled cigarettes, to explain the construction to a visitor.

The New York accent might seem out of place in Levant, but Terra came to Maine to embrace rural customs in a headlong fashion. His accomplishment with the Spee is remarkable, but of a lesser order than that of building a home from the foundation up.

His house is a work of art featuring oak woodwork, hand-laid tiles in bath and kitchen, and a commanding view of his private airstrip and hangar that shelters a single-engine Maule, number one, that Terra rebuilt himself.

The house used to be a bed and breakfast, Terra Inn, run by Bill and his wife, Caroline, but time is precious for the retired New York City firefighter and he stopped catering to tourists several years ago.

When Terra is not doing detail work on the Spee or flying, there still is plenty to do. He is a collector of modern and antique firearms and cartridges and keeps a large collection of cartridges, including a few that are his own creations, products of a sense of humor that only other shooters could appreciate.

Keeping the airstrip and acres of lawn and field in shape is a Herculean task calling for use of farm tractors for mowing chores – not the “Green Acres machines” found at Sears but real farm tractors – three of them with assorted mower attachments. A lawn tractor would be woefully inadequate for the expanse of green that challenges the Terra household each summer.

Ironically, the task of mowing that confronts Terra is not too unlike the task the Graf Spee crew encountered in 1939. But the difference is that Terra says he plans to cruise on to victory.