Flicka Niamh

Flicka Friends #38 (Spring 2006) carries Greg Dawson's account of his Flicka Someday; the article gives no hull number, so it is the registry rather than the newsletter that identifies her as Niamh. Dawson wrote that she was unnamed when he bought her in the autumn of 2003 and that he named her for the promise he had long made himself. She had been a Lake Michigan boat for her first sixteen years, and in the three seasons before he bought her went in the water only six weeks each winter, for trips between Panama City and Key West. He kept her in a slip on the Tennessee River in Alabama and was moving her to Demopolis Yacht Basin to be worked on ashore.

The work was preparation for an attempt to sail her westabout around Cape Horn and on around the world, leaving in April 2008: a ten-leg itinerary of some 34,400 miles from Mobile by way of the Azores, the Falklands, Bora Bora, Sydney, Cocos Keeling, Cape Town and Barbados. The list ran to refitting the ports, replacing the through-hull plumbing, installing radios, fitting a dodger and adding a furler.

As Niamh — 1984 Pacific Seacraft hull #278 — she appeared in Flicka Friends #68 (Spring 2020) in photographs of her last sail of the 2019 season on the Detroit River, taken by sailing neighbours who had just hauled their own boat out.