Photograph: Werner Schmidt

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Rowing Online

Some years back I was subscribing to and writing book reviews and small pieces for the beautiful magazine Maritime Life and Traditions. I was sad when it went down the pipes in 2006. Somehow the National Maritime Historical Society’s magazine Sea History started to come instead, I guess as compensation, but when they wanted me to subscribe to it, I politely declined. To me, Sea History, although a nice publication, never came close to what Maritime Life and Traditions used to be, a first-class publication with well-written articles and wonderful illustrations in colour. On Friday, the latest issue of Sea History, No. 133, Winter 2010-11, showed up in the mail box. With the magazine came a letter asking me to ‘come back’ as a subscriber.


Yesterday, I had the time to flip through the magazine, and on page 50 I saw an interesting article by Peter McCracken, “Competitive Rowing Online”. McCracken writes “Competitive rowing, like any pastime, has an online presence these days. Rowing history, curiously, is not well represented online, but a 20004 essay titled “The Danerously Neglected Legacy of Rowing”
at rowinghistory.net provides some considerations as to why this is so.” Even though Peter McCracken never mentions the name of the author of that great article, Thomas E. Weil, McCracken is right, the article gives the reader a lot to think about.

Then follows a list with descriptions of valuable rowing links (many you will find under my ‘Good Rowing Links’ on the right). Allow me to here quote McCracken: River & Rowing Museum; Fishmongers’ Company (which organise The Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race); Rowing History (The Friends of Rowing History); the National Rowing Foundation; Row2K; Henley Royal Regatta; The Boat Race; Head of the Charles; Pocock Racing Shells; Northwest Maritime Center; USRowing; Rowing Canada; British Rowing; 2012 London Olympic Rowing; and FISA World Rowing. Two rowing blogs are also mentioned in the article: Chris Partridge’s Rowing for Pleasure and HTBS (the blog you are on right now.)

Peter McCracken is happy to welcome other suggestions, please e-mail him at peter@shipindex.org

2 comments:

  1. Rowing for Pleasure is mentioned in Sea History, eh? I am honoured! Just as long as McCracken isn't looking for scholarly research or academic rigour....
    Gotta go. Got this sweet baby pic to post.

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  2. No, Chris, I don't think that Peter McCracken are looking for "scholarly research or academic rigour...", I mean, even HTBS was mentioned!

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