Where are we heading with Yacht Racing .com

With most of our competitors going out of business last year i.e.: Quokka Sailing, SailSail, and many others; we have emerged at the top of the Yachting news and information world.

March 25th brings another milestone. Our biggest competitor, MadforSailing is becoming a subscription online magazine. This should bring the rest of the Yachting World to our corner.

Eventually, I believe that even we will be on a subscription basis. However, the subscription will be based on volume instead of individual expense. After a great deal of research, I believe that 1 dollar a month per customer will bring in sufficient money to hire the finest photographers and writers with an expected readership of 25 to 50 thousand worldwide. We already get 20 thousand hits on Mondays. Along with the few Sponsors we will allow on the site, there will be plenty of money to run the best online publication in the world.

At present, our sport is flooded with paper magazines bringing month old news and stories. The current publications are putting out less and less information and more and more advertisements. I love reading Latitude 38, but get tired of flipping through pages before I even reach the first article around page 104. As far as the full color monsters, their time is short. The Internet is slowly improving to the point where we can bring full color pictures to you minutes after they happen. Within a couple hours of Team SEB's rig coming down in the middle of nowhere, they sent pictures of their jury rig to us and we had them up immediately. Within a few hours after that we even had pictures from the opposite side of the world where the back-up mast was being prepared for shipment. When Titan and Decision had their NASCAR style collision in Key West, Rich Roberts was the first on the scene with his trusty camera in hand. The incident happened at 3pm and we had the pictures and story up at 2pm. How did we do it? The 3 hour time zone change works well for us.

So far, it has been a relatively low profit venture as we build the foundation for a successful online magazine. Our friends have come through with flying colors to help make YachtRacing.com a success. The addition of Rich Roberts and his professional journalism has been the greatest step forward thus far. Teamed up with Sean Downey, Mark Itnyre, and the support of a great partner (Julie) and the undying efforts of a great Mom; we have been able to bring up to date news and stories for the last year and a half. My Partner Jeff Busche has also been a great help by giving Yachtracing.com unlimited server space. We have 350 pages of information, results and archives already and plan to go to 1,000 with archives of most major Yacht Races in the world. We also intend to have a bio database of the top 100 sailors in the world. One of our little databases has already sprung into its own entity. I started collecting Yacht Club websites a year ago and now YachtClub.com has links to almost every Yacht Club in the World.

One of the features that we recieved a lot of email on is our Babe of the Day. We had to discontinue the feature against your and our wishes because we simply weren't recieving enough pictures from around the world. Our women readers were relieved, but I have had over 100 emails from disgruntled sailors that were not happy with the removal of that feature. When we have the budget, we will certainly revive that feature and do a photoshoot ourselves.

Another feature we intend to start is Local News From Around the World. We are building a webring that will allow contributing editors from around the globe to input their own stories and pictures. Webmasters from each area are being encouraged to join us to bring all the news 24 hours a day. Bayview Yacht Club will be sending us the stories from the Detroit area New Orleans Yacht Club is already helping to bring the Lake Ponchetraine news. We have friends in Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia; but we need more help. If you are a writer or webmaster for a Yacht Club or Yachting Organization, please contact us about putting your news out to the world. Email us with your location and future events.

As far as Advertising and Sponsorships, we will always keep that to a minimum so that YachtRacing.com never becomes an irritant like so many other sites on the web. I really got caught up with the Flash applications until I realized that after you visit the site once and marvel at a few moving words and sounds, you quickly become annoyed at the long loading times and just click Skip Intro. As long as I Helm this Ship, there will not be any Pop-Up windows, blind links, or Flash Intros. There will be an occasional animated.gif since they load quickly and are fun to make. Our job is to bring YachtRacing news and information to the world as efficiently as is possible.

To the question of Sound bites on the pages. This was added to keep the staff and friends entertained. There are thousands of sound bites that are amusing or relevant to the stories of the day. Eventually we will have daily quotes or sailing sounds from the Yachting community, so please turn your speakers off or down if the sound is a burden to you.

We have another site called YachtRacing.TV that we plan on airing this fall. It will be a YachtRacing Video site for video clips from the World of YachtRacing. The current technology is not quite ready for quality video streaming, so we will wait till it is. It was quite amazing to see the waterspout from the Sydney-Hobart live and in color, but real Television is still so far superior in quality that it is not yet worth pursuing.

Remember that YachtRacing.com is a labor of love and requires feedback from every facet of the sport. If it's noteworthy or entertaining we'll print it.

Thank you to all of the contributors so far.

Thank you to Rich Roberts and Sean Downey
Chris Gillum (Santa Barbara), Adam Belshe(New Zealand), Max Ranchi(Italy)
Andrew Sims(Maine), Molly Winkleman(Chicago), Jerry Kaye(PHRF)
Glen Styron and Valerie Hoskin (artwork)
Al and Vicki Shultz (Income and Carbon)
Mike Campbell and Associates (Income and many past victories)
Jeff Busche(webmaster extrordinaire)
Byron Watson, Randy Krebs, and Shep(Humor)
Julie, Sarah, Ken, Ann, and Raider for the nice place to work and occasionally sleep
Seth and The Bull Crew for the 10 great days to Hawaii
Tom Leweck and Scuttlebutt for Link Support