What’s in a name?
Issue 82 : Jan/Feb 2012
It’s hard to believe Good Old Boat is approaching its 15th birthday. It was 15 years ago this past fall that Jerry and I sat on Mystic in the Canadian Slate Islands of Lake Superior and decided to start “the sailing magazine for the rest of us.”
Of course, we didn’t think of it that way right from the start. Our concept was that this would be the magazine for the “orphan fleet,” the many boats whose manufacturers had gone out of business in the 1980s. For what we had in mind in those early days, we had the Catalina Mainsheet, a magazine for Catalina owners, as a prototype.
At that point, choosing the name for it was perhaps the hardest part. We were yet to learn the many hard lessons that come to totally unprepared publishers. But choosing a name was not easy. I wanted to be clear that it was a sailing magazine, even though the words “sail” and “sailing” were taken by other publications. Still, it had to include something about “wind” or “breeze” or “sailboat” in the name. The name Good Old Boat came up early on the lists, but it was discarded since Jerry thought “old” was a misleading term (causing people to think of wooden boats) and perhaps too negative (isn’t “young and new” somehow better than “old” in most people’s minds?).
We settled at that time on Prevailing Winds. That name means the most frequent wind direction, of course, but it also meant to us that these fiberglass sailboats have managed to last and last and last beyond their manufacturers’ wildest expectations. In fact, the prolific and enduring classic-plastic fleet eventually became the biggest competition the manufacturers faced when selling new fiberglass models.
And “prevailing” meant one more thing: the ability to keep going against the odds. This meaning is the one that is increasingly significant to me as we look forward to celebrating our 15th anniversary in the summer of 2013. This magazine has indeed prevailed through several economic implosions and explosions and has been growing for the past several years in spite of all odds. That growth has come thanks to you, our subscribers. We thank you, every one.
Our boats prevail and the magazine about our fleet of good old fiberglass sailboats prevails too. As for the name, Prevailing Winds, we did an Internet search at the time and learned that there was a magazine for mercenaries by that name. That news caused us to reverse course and choose the name Good Old Boat with the tagline (at the time) of “Still Sailing After All These Years” to get the sailing concept in the name somewhere. And we never looked back.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
