Great support makes it possible, and fun (sorta)
After retiring from the military and attending journalism school, I glommed onto the idea of publishing a magazine once I moved home to Florida. At first, it was to be a print fly fishing publication, but further study made me all too aware of the extraordinary cost of such a venture; it was put on hold. A few months later I researched the possibility of doing an online version, but found little support (okay—no support) for my concept. It seems a fly fishing magazine was not in the cards, though something else was, even though I didn’t know it then.
Back in October of 2007 I was trying to decide whether to restore my reproduction E.M. White sailing canoe, or build a new one. I posted the thread “Time for a new sailing canoe…” in the Woodenboat Forum to pick the collective brains of my fellow WB “Forumites.” Well! After an untold number of responses, various and sundry insights and a lot of brotherly (and sisterly) suggestions, it occurred to me that there was a great potential for a magazine, a canoe sailing magazine. An online canoe sailing magazine.
With the invaluable help of my friend (and ‘IT Department’) Bernadette McCarthy, not a little amount of lost sleep and a whole lot of training and patience on Bern’s part, we went online with Canoe Sailing Magazine January 20, 2008.
During this year, Canoe Sailing Magazine has published about a hundred articles and has been read by more than 27,000 individuals on every continent, save Antarctica, for a total of more than 297,000 pages read and more than 41Gb of data transferred. As far as I can tell, it’s not too shabby for a pastime that’s so unknown to many people. So far.
