After 20 years of publishing a magazine, it’s the little things that stick in my mind. Like our first office: one room divided by a flimsy wall. Three telephones all rang to a single number. When a call came in for Alex Agnew, our sales director, co-founder Greg Walsh or I would hand the phone over the divider, paying out coils of telephone cord. At the end of the day, our small office had more crisscrossed running rigging than an IOR racer with split running backs.
Then there was the time, years ago – when we were still putting the magazine together by cutting and pasting (with real paste) – I mistakenly labeled the “dangerous semicircle” of a hurricane the “navigable semicircle.” (Do hurricanes really have navigable semicircles? Seems like paranoid avoidance is a better strategy when it comes to these grizzlies of weather.)
Much better memories are of all the enthusiastic subscribers we’ve met at boat shows over the years. This past February in Miami, I met a reader who had subscribed from Issue 1 – all the way back to May 1985. It was exciting to meet an original subscriber, but it led to a slightly unnerving thought: This guy has known me longer than my wife and kids have. A look back is fun, but we’re still in mid-passage. What will tomorrow bring? We asked a group of today’s voyagers for their thoughts on the future of voyaging in the next 20 years. Their responses start on page 8. Voyaging has a future as long as there are brave souls like Corri and Willem Stein, willing to brave the lonely waters of the Southern Ocean. See their story on page 34. This issue also has our look at four new voyaging vessels in our American Yacht Review section.
