First off, I claim no particular expertise but the battle has held my imagination for many years and I have war gamed it since 1968. I have read extensively and from a wide variety of sources but do not take my word for anything by itself.
Here's Drachinfel's Jutland
and:
There were several convoy defence actions but all were in the North Sea. In October 1917 cruisers SMS Bremse and Brummer almost wiped out a Bergen to Edinburgh convoy sinking two destroyers and nine of eleven merchant ships without getting their paint scratched. After this disaster the Admiralty tasked a division of dreadnoughts (and occasionally an entire battle squadron) from the Grand Fleet to cover (not close escort) the Scandinavian convoys.
In April 1918 Scheer took the entire High Seas Fleet to sea with the aim of destroying both a convoy and its covering force but the sortie was a fiasco. There was no convoy at sea and SMS Moltke dropped a propeller, which caused a turbine to overspeed and explode, wrecking the ship and bringing her close to sinking. This demonstrates how far the Fleet had deteriorated since well maintained ships do not generally shed a propeller at cruising speed.
So your scenario is certainly plausible with the caveat that the Germans lacked the endurance to operate in the Atlantic and so your convoy actions should be in the North Sea. Staring in 1916 there were regular convoys between Norway and the UK and from the start of the War, small "coal convoys" escorted by older destroyers and torpedo-gunboats sailed up and down Britain's east coast. The Germans achieved two successful interceptions of the Norwegian convoys but never seriously disrupted the coal convoys.
The only time the German battlefleet operated in the Atlantic was on exercise in 1911 and for less than two-days. In the spring of 1914, two Kaiser Class battleships sailed from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Wilhelmshaven without refuelling, which was a pretty respectable achievement for a capital ship fitted with coal fired propulsion. However, the voyage was through the Channel (which would be closed by the War) and the cruising speed was a stately 12-knots, fully four-knots less than the High Seas Fleet cruising speed.
Scheer knew that no Atlantic operations were possible for his regular surface warships. Only armed merchant cruisers and U-Boats could interdict Britain's sea lines of communications. This is why the oft-quoted Churchill pronouncement that "Jellicoe is the only man who could lose the War in an afternoon" is merely dramatic Churchillian hyperbole endlessly parroted, often by people who should know better.
Anyway, nice pics.
-C
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