Experience Matters • With this, our 198th edition of BWS, we are happy to bring you a new logo on the cover and a new layout inside. By renewing the look of the magazine, we are setting our sights on the future with confidence. We know that offshore sailing and cruising will always have an enthusiastic following that wants and needs a high quality magazine that speaks their language.
This was never more evident than at the start of this year’s Salty Dawg Rally, which sails from Hampton, VA to the Bitter End Yacht Club in the BVI—a distance of some 1,300 blue water miles. A total of 59 boats showed up for the early November start of this free, all-volunteer event. More than 250 sailors attended the send-off party, and many thousands more have been following the fleet via email and satellite tracking. As a lead sponsor of the event, BWS is happy to say that our readers are out there doing it.
This year, BWS supplied the fleet with goody bags, lined up the services of Chris Parker, who delivers excellent weather and routing to the fleet, and offered each Salty Dawg a free one-year digital subscription to BWS through Zinio. If you haven’t yet seen our digital version, check it out at www.zinio.com/bluewatersailing.
For us, being involved with the Salty Dawgs is simply good fun and good citizenship. The sailors who take part are the kind of people who write for us and give the magazine the authority you expect on a wide range of topics—from seamanship and sailing skills to provisioning, electronics and more. Experience does matter.
That’s why we bring you the most experienced lineup of editors and writers with offshore experience in the sailing world. On staff, we have people who have sailed more than a quarter million offshore miles. And our stable of regular contributors is unmatched. Longtime columnist Bill Biewenga told us when asked that he had stopped counting at 400,000 offshore miles. Regular contributors John Neal and Amanda Swan Neal, whose seminars BWS has sponsored for the last decade, have cumulatively sailed 583,000 miles across the blue water. And columnist David Burch has logged more than 70,000 miles at sea.
So when you pick up your copy of BWS at the newsstand or retrieve it from the mailbox, you know that the articles, how-to pieces and reviews that lie between its covers are guided by voices of experience that you can trust. Whether you are sailing along the coasts or voyaging across oceans, you need information that will keep you safe, techniques to build your skills and real stories to inspire you to do more. And that’s exactly what we bring you every month.
We are happy to have you sailing with us. Look for our collector’s edition 200th issue in March!