Flicka Hrai Roo

Hrai Roo is Nor'Star hull #11, her hull laid up in Santa Barbara and the rest of her finished from 1976 by a young couple, Paul and Donna, who meant to sail her to Australia. Debbie Custer's history of the boat in Flicka Friends #34 (Spring 2005) describes her being built out of scraps of African mahogany, teak and rosewood over one-inch marine plywood, and rowed out of the harbour under fourteen-foot sweeps. The Australian plan lapsed; she went instead to the Arizona desert and several seasons among the canyons of Lake Powell, then north in the mid-1980s to a tarped shed in the Idaho mountains, where she sat for fourteen years. Her name is from Watership Down — hrair, a number past counting, and roo, the littlest of anything.

Jim and Debbie Custer found her in a want ad in 48 North and rebuilt her in their slip at the Des Moines Marina on Puget Sound: pulpits, stanchions and lifelines, new bowsprit cheeks, all new standing and running rigging with a backstay added, a new boom and boom gallows, a rebuilt cockpit with lazarette drains, a hinged bridgedeck, new bronze portlights, a mahogany hull ceiling and a re-fibreglassed rudder. Gear was chosen the same way: an 8 hp Honda outboard, a 50-watt solar panel and a single gel cell, a sextant and two hand-held GPS units, new Lee Sails, and later a Fleming vane and a drogue. There was no liferaft, watermaker, EPIRB, radar or refrigeration aboard.

She left the Des Moines slip for the last time on 3 August 2002, hand-steered down the coast after the homebuilt self-steering gear failed days before departure, and was anchored in Turtle Bay on the Baja coast by that Christmas. From Mexico she crossed the Pacific in 2003 to the Marquesas, French Polynesia, the Northern Cooks and Kiribati, and on to Hawaii, where she was laid up on the hard at Gentry's Marina on the Big Island and later shipped home on a ship's deck. Debbie Custer returned to the story in Flicka Friends #70 (Summer 2020) with "Turning Left Into The Pacific."

Hrai Roo is a well travelled Flicka from Seattle. She completed a Pacific voyage in 2002-03 from Seattle to Mexico, Marquesas, French Polynesia, Northern Cooks, Kiribati and Hawaii.