Flicka Blue Skies

Tom Davison, then editor of Flicka Friends, bought Pacific Seacraft Flicka #314 in the fall of 2012 and travelled out to the San Juan Islands that October to see her. She is already Blue Skies in Flicka Friends #48 (Winter 2012) — a 1985 boat, hull number 314 — where Davison's caption notes that the name would be changed in the spring after a proper ceremony. Her berth was in Fisherman's Bay on Lopez Island, Washington. Davison flew west to sail her, reckoning in the Winter 2013 issue that he had spent some thirty days that year getting to and aboard her; by Flicka Friends #56 (Winter 2014) the marina had lifted her five times across three trips.

One refinement was already aboard when he took her over. The two mainsheet v-cleats found on nearly every Flicka had been replaced with bronze Davey and Company tubular jam cleats screwed to the stern rail, an arrangement he judged a clear improvement on the stock traveler in Flicka Friends #50 (Spring 2013); a 130 percent hanked genoa came with the boat. Davison's own work ran to the small and practical, and not all of it was finished: he set out to replace the three AC outlets flagged as non-GFI in the survey, only to find the parts he had bought were household rather than marine grade and to leave the job for a later trip; he found the Icom IC-M422 VHF neither registered with an MMSI number nor connected to GPS, both of which needed taking care of before a Digital Selective Calling distress message could carry her position, and judged the less complicated path the purchase of a new marine radio with GPS built in; and he shipped out a new laminated mahogany tiller that Randy Richardson of Zanzibar had made for her, meaning to fit it and move the old tiller into the port quarter-berth as a spare on a later trip.

Each winter she came ashore in the Lopez Island marina yard, set on wooden cribbing with four chained Brownell boat stands; the travel-lift dock there needs a four-foot tide, so Davison checked the tables before booking his flights across the country. Her sailing was almost all in the San Juans and the wider Salish Sea, with Friday Harbor and Roche Harbor recurring in the newsletter's photographs and visits to Deer Harbor on Orcas Island and Blakely Island as well. She was still there in 2020, pictured approaching Friday Harbor and turning south out of Spieden Channel in Flicka Friends #68.

Blue Skies now sold 24/3/22.

s/v Blue Skies for sale brochure