To blog or not to blog, this is the question.

More accurately my question is whether to stop keeping the blog, and to paraphrase that shaking spear bloke – that by not paying for another year’s subscription I simply end it permanently and then it’s gone and done with. For much of the last few months that’s the way I have been thinking, especially when my fledgling YouTube channel starts to gain a few subscribers ; then recently I added two recumbent trike based video’s – the only result of which was that I lost a few subscribers and I have to consider that if I had done those 2 pieces as blog posts then nobody would have noticed and I would still have those subscribers. Then, this week, another viewer (of my channel) passed comment that they would miss my blog as occasionally they enjoy dipping into some of my older posts…..in ‘shaking spear’ kind of language that must ‘give us pause’ as the man once said himself.

I did almost run out of steam (or at least things to write about) and that was early in the social isolation experiment called ‘lockdown’, I thought that the least I could do was to continue to provide engaging internet content for free even when I din’t feel like doing so. Like most people I don’t even remember much of what I did that summer – aside from slipping out for as many walks as I felt I could get away with. Looking back on them, my posts weren’t very good as I had little new sailing content to work with and that also meant that the mainstay of the blog, it’s new photography, wasn’t happening either. Things picked up in that I had new content to work on once I started to build the Pathfinder – which also gave me reason to get up in the morning.

I feel now that I missed a golden opportunity to blog about a genuine health crisis although now I don’t think the crisis was what we thought it was back then and only, over time does the truth slowly appear.

My problem, with boat based content now, is that, once again, I have run out of material and that will be the case until I can introduce seawater into the boat’s life once more. I thought, about a week ago that there was a narrow weather slot appearing in, then, a few days ahead so I ran around like a mad thing preparing the boat to first go out on the road again and then do sea trials with a more comfortable night on board. What I really needed, and still need, is days that aren’t going dark at 1700, light winds and no actual rain and on top of all that a period of easy (neap) tides. Well, the weather window closed abruptly with a series of depressions piling in over the Atlantic and on the only slightly suitable day it was both early season cold , windier than I wanted and we didn’t have the car available to tow the boat with. It looks like my plan will have to go to plan B and just bide my time until the sun gets a bit higher and this miserable wet and claggy weather rolls away ; in the meantime I have a new venture to work with – that’s setting up and getting used to the recumbent trike.

I found it quite funny when I did both long blog posts and then two quite long video segments about the trike, the second film was quite a new technical achievement in that I improvised a way of filming while whizzing back down the lanes at speed. The really funny part is that it both continued the blog and my video output with new subject matter although the end result of both was hardly any blog or video views and a significant drop in my subscriber base.

My worry now is that I may have passed my sell-by date as a limited genre sailing blogger, I think now that I did my best work as far back as 2019 when I was aboard my previous boat for 110 days in Brittany – the blog felt most like a blog should do right then and it’s all been on a downward slide since then. My problem now is I feel like now is that natural time to put the blog to bed and to move on and do different things …..except that most of the pleasure of the blog is that I get to sit at the keyboard and slowly put language together in at least a slightly engaging and informative manner. If other people get something from it then all well and good.

This month I got a few requests and suggestions about keeping the blog in it’s current form so I started to work with one long term idea – that of storing and saving the blog content electronically in such a way as I could re-release the material at some future time. Part of my thinking is that this blog represents a lot of time and a large body of work (some 800 actual posts). My difficulty is that it took considerable time to copy-paste and store as a document file even a single post – and even then it wouldn’t save with the original photographs I had used to illustrate the post. The photograph file is now huge and doesn’t seem to save in any form except with the blog active – it would also be difficult to even find the individual photographs without mining through multiple files on my dodgy computer.

So I have been working on that and i’m not computer ‘tech savvy’ enough to know how to work around the problem. The other major thought is that to survive and even provide new content the blog has to change with my changing life and new interests – I really don’t find ways of saying anything new about the small boats, creeks and muddy boots that have occupied the main time of this blog. Equally I have dipped my toe into the world of political and social comment but they have generally made for poor posts even if I have worked hard on them …..after all they are just opinions even if they are verifiable ones.  There are other genres that I would like to post about because they too are hobby interests of mine – even when other content creators are so much better at the subject.

So…..from Wild Willy Shaking Spearat the start to Joe Strummer (late of The Clash) to end the piece with.

Should I stay or should I go ?