It has been a while since I visited the Good Old Boat Magazine website, and I was saddened to discover the magazine had ceased production just over a year ago, their final issue (March/April 2024) released only in digital format. According to their final Facebook post from February, 2024: “Unfortunately, for us, skyrocketing operating costs — paper, printing, and shipping — have become too much and there is no viable path forward. After trying to come up with a more tenable business plan and analyzing alternative publishing options from every angle, including deeply cutting costs and even pivoting to a digital only publication, the result is the same. A pathway forward would only be a temporary fix and the magazine’s quality would suffer.”
Begun by Karen Larson and Jerry Powlas in 1998, Good Old Boats’s 155 issues were published primarily for, as their magazine header always put it, “the rest of us”, meaning those who couldn’t afford brand new boats and for whom older boats, generally of the “classic plastic” generation, were the financial answer to getting out on the water on a reasonable budget. They even published an article in their July/August 2014 edition about some restoration projects I did with ORION - click this link to read it.
After 20 years of running Good Old Boat, Karen and Jerry retired, and although subsequent owners and staff tried to keep the magazine going, it just didn’t work out. Interestingly, the Sailrite company now owns all the intellectual property rights of Good Old Boat and is keeping the website running - for now - although there are no new articles, social media posts, or Dogwatch e-mail blasts since the beginning of 2024.
It’s a shame to see yet another magazine end production, sharing the fate of similar printed magazines like Messing About in Boats (ended 2022) and Small Craft Advisor (although SCA continues to send frequent e-mail newsletters and maintains an active website despite also ceasing printed production in 2022). I was a happy subscriber for a number of years before I had to cut back on my own magazine subcriptions and lost touch, and while I realize I’m pretty late to the memorial service, allow me to express my gratitude for the many wonderful stories, pictures, and articles published for the rest of us.