I registered the domain name ‘socalsail.com’ on July 9, 1997, intending to create a site that would be a resource for Southern California sailors. Over the next year I played around with setting up automated updates of the coastal marine forecast, and created an early version of the site’s Buyer’s Guide. But other projects intruded on my time, and what with one thing and another I never completed the site. It remained an unfinished demo, basically.

Although I never publicized the site, at some point I inadvertantly exposed its URL to the search engines, and shortly thereafter I started to notice that it was picking up some traffic. As time went on, I began to receive email from people about the site; most of them trying to contact companies in the the Buyer’s Guide. Eventually this shamed me into adding tools to allow users to register on the site, and for registered users to submit updates to the Buyer’s Guide info.

A few months ago I added Google Adsense ads to the site. A few weeks ago I got an email from Chris Tucker of SailTime Channel Islands, a fractional-ownership/charter outfit, asking about advertising possibilities. On November 1, 2005, SailTime became the site’s first banner advertiser.

I’ve been sailing in Southern California since I was a young boy; that photo is of Hilaria, the vintage 10-meter (originally built in 1927) that my father owned during the 1960s and early 1970s. It was on Hilaria that I first learned to sail, and I treasure those memories to this day. I’ll probably share some stories from that time in this weblog. In the meantime I’ll also be talking about sailing news, sharing information about resources for Southern California sailors, and generally doing my best to make this site as useful as possible.

Thanks for visiting.

This entry was posted by John Callender on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Socalsail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.