FC Newsletter

Ron Walton has published the Falmouth Cutter Newsletter No. 30, which is available here: http://www.samlmorse.com/img/FCNews30.pdf

Ron:

I am enjoying reading your newsletter. You may want to look at the Flicka Newsletter for ideas.

http://www.flicka20.com/friends/index.html

Tom Davison has done an outstanding job of publishing the Flicka Newsletter and running the website I started many years ago.

Fair Winds,

Rod

BCC IDUNA

P.S. There is a photo of A.O. Halsey’s Falmouth 26 in the latest issue under Marsh Harbor.

Hi Rod,

Thank you for your kind remarks about the FC News. And also for tipping me off to the Flicka website. I was not aware of the latter. It is a very nice website and Tom Davison sure produces a very high quality newsletter. I will be looking it over carefully to see how I can improve the FC News.

As a former editor of the Flicka website/newsletter, have you thought of doing the same for the BCCs. I don’t think there has been a BCC newsletter since before Mike Pearson sailed BCC Metaphora off to Hawaii. Even with the BCC and FC Forums it seems there should be a place for a newsletter chronicling some of the BCC and FC voyages, as well as offering articles about BCC/FC improvements, etc.

Of course now maybe the FC News and any BCC newsletter need to be coordinated with the Cape George yachts since our BCCs and FCs have moved to a new stable.

ron walton
editor: FC News

There is absolutely no problem in creating a newsletter: Ron has already given us all the relevant e-mail addresses (I hope!), however, a newsletter is more of a “blog” than a web page or a forum item. Coledata has no problem creating Blogs for every vessel where the HIN No., Owner’s name and home port is all registered on the database within the Coledata server.

The real deal, I think is, whether you have a BCC, an FC or a CCC (Remember it’s, Cape George Cutters), you have one intent - to cross oceans, safely and with spirit.

However, the TRUE value of the BCC/FC forum has always been the exchange of ideas, solutions and improvements, whether this has been served by Yahoo, Google or plain old Coledata. There is evidence that the CCC guys also think the same way, look at http://www.capegeorgecutters.net/forum/read.php?2,45 as an example.

In a way newsletters are slightly outmoded; the BCC/FC and the CCC forum websites all have RSS feeds and other methods of instantaneous updates, so that even the remote cruiser can at least access and respond to messages from the forums via e-mail.

I would much rather develop the website(s) into a “Where are You” LAT/LON environment, so that you can buy each other beers and swap stories over the superiorority of your personal vessel over the vessel owned by the guy who just bought the last round! The technology exists, as most of you are aware, but it is never done in ?real time?, what you see is always historic.

We have been working with real time updates for several years, but ?terrorism? foiled my plan. I used to be able to grab the LAT/LON of any vessel that e-mailed me via the various and diverse mariner services simply by parsing the headers. This is no longer possible, so I now have to rely on the sender inserting their LAT/LON into the body of their e-mails, and then it requires a real person to extract that data to create the traditional N or S x E or W, interpolate it, and therefore map it. Unfortunately, there are no true sailors that can ever afford to pay for that ?real person?.

Ultimately, we a forbidden, by law, from reading the content of an e-mail, unless we have express instructions from the generator of the e-mail to do so, and therefore the ?real person? becomes a mute issue. Therefore, if you want to let the world know where you are, copy me personally on the e-mail. I promise, I will try to keep up, but I can?t guarantee instantaneous service every day. (If you don?t know my personal e-mail address, send it to: (webmaster@samlmorse.com)

I?m sure this posting will create a multitude of suggestions, and I welcome them all, simply because the environment we currently experience changes so fast that I can never be on top of those things that are important to you. Tell us what you need, and our team will work hard to provide it.