Flicka Baby Grand

Baby Grand left the mould in December 1978 and was sold as a 1979 Sailaway Kit - complete enough to sail, but with no interior. Bill Strop set out her history in a Flicka Profile in Flicka Friends #29 (Spring 2003). Her first owner, Margery Durand of Willimantic, Connecticut, had the inside insulated and finished in light American ash by a Block Island cabinetmaker, deliberately leaving out the moulded fibreglass hull liner to win back stowage; plastic portlights gave way to silicone bronze, and it was settled before launch that she would carry no through hulls, her bilge and sink draining instead through a Y-valve and a cockpit-mounted Whale Gusher. She was first launched in 1982 on a custom Target trailer. She gained her name when Michael Banghart of Austin, Texas, who had outfitted her for ocean passage, passed her to Robert Ralph of Liberty, Missouri in 1987; Ralph replaced the standing rigging, led the lines aft, added a Bingham-designed mast erector and converted the winches to self-tailing Barient 17s.

Strop first saw her at the spring launch at Paradise Point, Smithville, Missouri in 1988, when she belonged to Robert's father Norman Ralph, and bought her in 1994. He added instruments that kept the hull intact - a taffrail log and a rudder-pintle depth sounder transducer - along with heavy bronze staghorn cleats to Pacific Seacraft 37 specification, a bronze foredeck bollard, a solar panel on a teak cabin-top rack, and a Sobstad suit with a fully battened main and three reefs. She was repainted in diamond black linear polyurethane in 2001. Earlier, in Flicka Friends #13 (Summer 1998), Strop had used her to argue for keeping a boat in Bristol order: when a deep low brought 30 knots gusting 40 to Smithville Lake she was the boat that went out, and after some dicey moments the sailors in the water were ashore and the casualty boats - two Sweet 16s and a Buccaneer - rescued, before she sailed the afternoon under reefs as the only vessel on the lake. Health forced him to offer her for sale in 2003.

Baby Grand is introduced in Flicka Profile in this issue of Flicka Friends:  Flicka Friends issue (PDF)