Great support makes it possible, and fun (sorta)
Ed Maurer, Publisher, Cape Carteret, North Carolina
 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. With our success, we have established a presence sponsoring Facebook’s Canoe and Kayak Sailing Group with its ever-growing membership and the Canoe and Kayak Sailing Blog<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> that provides readers yet another avenue to read some past articles and comments and observations that are more at home there than in the magazine. We have also begun writing on Twitter (I guess that would be Twittering….) and we invite any of you fellow Twitterers to keep an eye on what we do and let us Twitter with you, too! Of course, if you are not yet a Twitterer, you can join easily enough and become part of this growing social network.  Yes, it’s been a busy year and a year of meeting new folks both in person and online. As with any other venture, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I believe the support we’ve gotten has made it mostly ‘ups’ with few ‘downs.’ I would be remiss to point out some particularly helpful folks who have made the greatest contributions to our success. The first on my list must be Bernadette McCarthy, my ‘IT Department,’ without whom this publication would be a mere Blog. The next is the father of the Bufflehead sailing canoe, Hugh Horton, the most generous of my Contributing Editors, whose insight and knowledge about these ‘machines’ has been invaluable. Hugh is also not reluctant to call me out on a subject, and I’m grateful for his willingness to share his insight with me. Contributing Editor, Benson Gray, has contributed many,  many historic Old Town Canoe images that have really filled out our article library, making it an inspiration for those of us who love the old, 'Canadian' style canoes. Of course there are many other folks who have contributed the articles and photographs we share with you here. Without them, and you readers, this would be an I impossible effort. Thank you all for being with Canoe Sailing Magazine this year. I look forward to hearing from each of you and look forward to your contributions and inquiries. Without you, Canoe Sailing Magazine would not be “The Global Voice of Canoe and Kayak Sailing”! Happy Sailing!
Ed Maurer, Publisher
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