Okay, let's see if we can make this single longest thread in the history of BBS5. Introductions. Take a sec to write a few sentencs about yourself. Regulars and lurkers alike.
My name is David Churbuck. I founded Reel-Time with Thorne Sparkman III in the spring of 1995. Reel-Time started off as a weekly fishing report for Cape Cod and the Islands, with some articles written by Thorne and myself, and gradually new features like a gallery of the readers' fishing photos, and then this, the Reel-Time bulletin board.
I live on Cape Cod in the town of Cotuit in a big old house near the water with my wife, Daphne, three kids (Eliot 12, B 13, Fisher 4.5), dog (Harry), an 18ft Tashmoo skiff, and too much fishing tackle.
I've been flyfishing since 1991 when I moved to the Cape full time (I'd been a summer kid all my life) and needed something to do in my spare time. I was a telecommuting writer for Forbes magazine, had always been into fishing, and figured I figure out how to fish around Cotuit. I still am trying.
Thorne and I started Reel-Time in March 1995. He was working for Time-Warner's pioneering website: Pathfinder as a community expert, and I wanted to start a website so I could learn HTML. Both of us were convinced the web was the place to be in publishing and we agreed we wanted to focus on something we both knew very well, could produce material for, and which would eventually be self-supporting, then profitable.
Thorne was in business school, I stopped writing at Forbes and moved on to start and run the company's web publishing arm. We worked on Reel-Time at night and on weekends, selling an ad here and there to our first brave advertisers (most of whom are still with us three years later), writing stories, mailing out t-shirts, organizing conclaves (real life meetings where the bbs folks would get together for a night of fishing) and generally doing what we could to keep the project moving forward. In the first years there would be entire months when nothing would get updated. But the hardcore regulars hung in there and gave us the encouragement to expand.
The response from you, the readers and supporters of Reel-Time, has been the most gratifying thing of all. Just seeing a Reel-Time t-shirt on somebody in a Key West bar, the deck of a flats skiff, or a dark beach on Cape Cod is a total gas. Counting the number of postings to these bulletin boards, seeing the traffic grow and grow is all the proof we need that we're on the right track and doing something right. We've expanded our coverage from New England to Texas. We get more than 2000 messages a month on this forum alone ....
In the past year I have become much less active in the production of Reel-Time due to the reality that running the Forbes website means no telecommuting from Cotuit, but a commute to New York. Hence less fishing, and less time to do much more than keep an eye on these forums, try to settle flame wars, and give infrequent advice to Peter Jenkins and Thorne.
They have some great plans for the site, plans that include a technical overhaul so among other things, the old software we use to manage this forum will be replaced by something more useful and less prone to crashing, weird sorting, etc.
Please send me your suggestions in email to david@churbuck.com and continue to be patient with the snafus or glitches R-T may inflict on you from time to time. The most important thing you can give us is your participation. We know you're using this, we just don't always know who you are or why you use it.
This thread is for general introductions. Of EVERYONE. Regulars and first timers alike. We haven't done one of these for over a year.
Please post even if you've never posted before.
Here's your chance. Speak up, tell us in a couple sentences who you are, how old you are, where you live, what kind of boat you fish from, what kind of fish you like to catch, what you do for a living so you can live to fish, kids, best catch, worst experience .....
And only press Post Message ONCE!
David Churbuck
Reel-Time