About the Flicka 20

The Flicka is a 20-foot full-keel sailboat designed by Bruce Bingham in 1971. Bingham — a draftsman, sailor, and writer who would later co-author The Sailor's Sketchbook — drew the Flicka not as a racing yacht or a coastal weekender, but as a true small ship: a boat with the proportions, the displacement, and the seaworthiness of a vessel several feet longer.

The name Flicka means "little girl" in Swedish — a nod to Bingham's design philosophy that a small boat should still be a proper boat. With 5,500 to 6,000 pounds of displacement on a 20-foot hull, nearly half of it ballast, the Flicka has the heft and stability that boats twice her length often lack. She has standing headroom in the cabin, a real galley, sea berths, and an enclosed head — the inventory of a much larger cruiser, packed into a hull short enough to trailer.

Bingham first sold plans for amateur builders, and a small fleet of home-built Flickas appeared in fiberglass and wood through the early and mid-1970s. In 1977, Pacific Seacraft of Fullerton, California acquired the molds and put the Flicka into series production. Between 1978 and roughly 2000, Pacific Seacraft built more than 400 Flickas — most as masthead sloops, a handful as cutters or gaff-rigged.

What the Flicka is for

The Flicka excels at exactly what most owners ask of her: extended coastal cruising, gunkholing in shoal water, single-handed long-distance passages, and trailering between cruising grounds. She has crossed the Atlantic, sailed the South Pacific, transited French canals on her own bottom, and circumnavigated the British Isles. Owners regularly describe weather she's handled — gales off Portland Bill, force-8 mistrals in the Mediterranean, Hurricane Harvey at Port Aransas — with the same quiet "she came through fine" tone that you hear from owners of much larger boats.

She's also a forgiving day sailor. Her short waterline makes her slow on light-air reaching, but her long keel and heavy displacement make her steady on long passages and tolerant of shifts in load and trim. She'll sit at anchor in a chop without rolling herself sick. She's small enough that one person can handle her, big enough that two can live aboard for weeks.

The community

Roughly 400 Flickas were built and most are still afloat. The owners' newsletter, Flicka Friends, has been published continuously since 1995 — there are 71 issues archived here, chronicling improvements, passages, and the lives of the boats and the people who own them. The FlickaBase tracks 207 boats by hull number, location, owner, and rig.

About Bruce Bingham

Bruce Bingham (1929–2018) was a self-taught naval architect and one of the great popularizers of small-boat cruising. Beyond the Flicka, he designed the Allegra 24 and the Fantasia 35; he also wrote and illustrated The Sailor's Sketchbook with his partner Katy Burke, a working-sailor's reference that shaped a generation of cruisers. He sailed extensively in the boats he drew, which is part of why those boats sail so well.