Flicka Selected Risks

Anthony Steward had already circumnavigated in a nineteen-foot open boat when he settled on a Flicka for an attempt at the smallest non-stop solo circumnavigation, a decision he traced in Flicka Friends #13 (Summer 1998) to watching one sail in Force 6 off the South African coast. The Knudsen family in Durban built the boat; Steward took the hull and deck in November 1993 and launched Selected Risks at the end of January 1994, her first sea trial being the Wednesday night race in Durban Harbour, where she held off yachts twice her size. She was fitted out plainly and heavily for the job — a collision bulkhead at the mast with a watertight hatch, stores in bolted-down milk crates, two watermakers, three 75-watt solar panels and a petrol generator under the cockpit — and sailed from Durban on 26 February 1994 with 1.2 tons aboard.

She was off East London thirty-six hours later at an average of 7.5 knots, touching 9.2 knots over the ground once she picked up the centre of the current, and lay hove to for thirty-six hours in a forty-five knot gale off Cape Agulhas without complaint. In the South Atlantic, under a 200% genoa and poled-out staysail, she logged between 119 and 137 nautical miles a day for her first five days out of Cape Town. The voyage ended in the Atlantic when petrol caught fire as Steward refuelled the running generator in a seaway; the interior was gutted and he was badly burned, reaching St Helena four or five days later. He wrote afterwards that the Flicka would have done it, and that the fault was his.

At the moment she's not in very good shape at all, but I will update this when she's restored and ready to sail once again...
Leon Thornton - April 2009

Anthony Steward attempted to circumnavigate this flicka via cape horn but had a fire on board from the petrol generator which ended the voyage.

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