About us…

Thank you for your interest in our little magazine devoted to the pleasures of messing about in boats. After 38 years and just over 750 issues we have yet to run out of fascinating and informative articles (mostly submitted by our readers) extolling the pleasures to be had messing about in affordable small boats unspoiled by today’s overwhelming technology.

Our Home Page features the cover of the current issue, and its table of contents on this page illustrates a typical range of topics covered in each 76-page issue. Looking down the list you will find a broad range of reports on events and gatherings, reader adventures afloat, historical stories from simpler times, readers’ tales of designing, building and restoring the boats of their dreams, as well as regular columns by contributing readers on a variety of small boat related topics. Included on this website is a feature story from this issue to better give you a look at what sort of reading you might expect to enjoy.

If these stimulate further interest we suggest that you request the Free Sample Copy we offer. Should this then suggest you’d like to see more but still are wary of committing $40 for a full year subscription, we offer a three month Trial Subscription for $10. All these options can be found on the Subscription Order Form page.

Another service we provide to any interested persons (subscribers or not) are scanned copies of bygone articles found in the Index of Articles 1983-2000. These can be ordered from amongst the thousands of articles we published during those years from the Index, the details are located on the “Index of Articles 1983-2000” introductory page. The Index stops in 2000 as that is as far as a volunteer reader undertook to inventory our archives at that time. We have had no time to pursue indexing the years 2001 to the present, we’ve been too busy turning out the magazines we now offer.

I launched this magazine in the spring of 1983 as I found the available consumer oriented magazines were not speaking to my interests and the various small club newsletters were too small to cover the multitude of topics I felt were out there of interest to myself and others interested in do-it-yourself small boating. Today we offer 76 pages full of small boat news in six issues bi/monthly.

Bob Hicks, Editor & Publisher

On the Cover ...

Frequent contributor, Richard Honan, took his just completed peapod, Waylo-Waylo, to the 15th (and final) Small Reach Regatta at Brooklin, Maine in early July where he took our cover photo picturing the enjoyment of traditional small craft at its best on a calm sea amongst the Maine Coast islands under blue skies. Its conception history is summarized thusly:

“In 2006, a group of sail-and-oars boats gathered for an informal cruise in Maine to answer a question: could we succeed here with a large gathering of such boats, inspired by “Raids” in Europe and by the famed Eggemoggin Reach Regatta for classic yachts? The reply was an enthusiastic “yes,” and for three more years like-minded people sailed the same waters the ERR has sailed annually since 1985. This experience gave us our name, “The Small Reach Regatta”, and we then became organized entirely under the auspices of the Downeast Chapter of the Traditional Small Craft Association.”

No word has reached us as to why this year is the final one of what had become a highly attractive small boat messabout.