The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

AAC Is 20 Years Old

It just struck Phyllis and me that this April was the twentieth anniversary of our first publication of morganscloud.com, the site that eventually became Attainable Adventure Cruising, and so we thought it would be fun to share a few of the steps along the way to getting here.

How It Started

In the early spring of 2003 our second winter on the boat at Tromsø, Norway was drawing to a close. We had been voyaging for 12 years, during which we had written a bunch of articles for several cruising magazines in both the USA and UK.

And that had spawned a bunch of emails from readers with questions, to the point we realized that publishing the answers was way more useful than answering them individually.

Can We Make Money at This?

And, since the window that we had allotted ourselves to go cruising after selling my two businesses in Bermuda was drawing to a close—read empty bank account syndrome—we were exploring the possibility of financing our sailing habit by consulting with those who wished to follow in our wake, particularly to the high latitudes.

Here’s what morganscloud.com looked like then, kindness of WayBackMachine:

Click to enlarge

This was a static site built with Microsoft FrontPage.

Consulting a Bust

And that’s how things remained for the next few years while we did a major refit on the boat as well as selling our home in Bermuda, which extended our cruising time. A good thing since the consulting idea proved to be a bust, other than yielding a guide job I did on a superyacht in 2006.

By 2007 we were tailing off our writing for magazines—the amount they paid us was dropping every year and at the same time their contracts were getting ever more one sided, and even predatory—which gave us more time and energy for the site.

An Interim Architecture

And that in turn lead to the realization that we needed a better way to create content, and also it would be good if our readers could comment.

So we opened an account at Blogger for new posts and then every few months laboriously curated and archived them at morganscloud.com using Adobe Dreamweaver, like FrontPage a static page builder but at least a better one.

Way Better With WordPress

That was clearly not a sustainable model, particularly since curating hundreds of articles in a static HTML web site was a sure route to madness, so, on the suggestion of our now son-in-law, we ported the whole thing to self-hosted WordPress—the content management system that powers a bit over 60% of the internet—by hand. A task that still makes Phyllis wince when it’s mentioned.

And we redesigned the site using a busy three-column layout of the type that was all the rage in those far off days before small-screen mobile browsing took off:

The first WordPress site. Click to enlarge.

New Writers

It was also around this time that we got a very thoughtful email from a guy named Colin Speedie. So thoughtful and well written that we asked him if he was interested in writing for AAC. He was, and did.

And then Matt Marsh started bringing a lot of engineering wisdom and rigour to the comments, so we asked him to write, too. And he has.

The most amazing thing is that both Colin and Matt wrote for free for several years, while we were struggling with the revenue thing.

That said, we were able to retroactively pay them for all of those past articles, albeit hardly a princely sum, and they are both paid more appropriately now using a shared revenue model so as the site does better, they do too.

Then in 2016 Andy Schell brought a younger voyager’s perspective to AAC.

And the Barnes family added a fascinating perspective on doing seriously aggressive voyaging as a family with Molly, Christopher and their son Jack all contributing.

Last year we were excited to welcome Eric Klem as an AAC writer with his debut article.

Membership

And that’s how things remained until May 2013 when, despite having tried a bunch of different ways to monetize the site including donations, advertising and selling prints of my photographs, we realized that it was time to either make a radical change or wind it up, since the site was actually costing us more money in servers, security and all the other stuff required to service over 250,000 unique readers a year than it was bringing in.

And, further, writing for and maintaining the site was taking time and energy away from the very real need to get some regular income before we got too much older—yup, the horrid prospect of getting real jobs was looming.

But before going down that road, we decided to give the site one more chance to pay its way and keep us sailing by switching to a paid membership model.

Sounds like a no-brainer today, but back then we were at the height of the “information longs to be free” idiocy—how any sentient being could think that good original content can be created without paying the creator is one of the world’s great mysteries—and we got huge push back.

It Worked

But a small cadre of loyal readers signed up and over the years that number grew just quickly enough to keep the whole thing viable, as well as contribute enough to make the considerable work worthwhile, as well as topping up the retirement fund, at least to the point that premium dog food, instead of the cheap stuff, was back in our future, should we live a long time.

And this, in turn, enabled us to invest the time to update the site, over several iterations, to the simple mobile-friendly design you see today.

We have also invested ever more money on faster servers, a better membership system, ever better security, a content delivery network (CDN), better and more feature-rich email list management, and on it goes.

Until The Pandemic

The next big challenge came with the pandemic, which brought our membership growth to a shuddering halt at just the time our expenses were skyrocketing as the best-of-breed service providers we were using all realized simultaneously that they were relying too much on growth to remain viable (as we were) and upped their prices—many doubled over a couple of years.

There was only one thing to do. We followed suit in June of 2022 by upping our prices 50%, even though we were worried that so doing would be the end of AAC—it was kill or cure time.

It Worked Again

Well, it worked. Although growth has not returned to the levels we enjoyed before the pandemic, there has been no shrinkage in member numbers since the price increase.

And most heartwarming of all, over the last 10 months 64 members became AAC supporters at US$120/year and some 220 members, who were grandfathered in at lower rates, voluntarily upped their membership to the current rate of US$36/year.

Thanks to both groups; it’s that sort of support that keeps us in the game.

Some Fun Statistics

As of the time of writing:

  • There are currently 1219 articles in the archives, curated into 90 topics and 12 Online Books.
  • If we assume an average of 2000 words an article that’s nearly 2.5 million words.
  • Actually, between Phyllis, Colin, Matt, Andy, the Barnes family, and me, we have written way more than that, since we frequently delete articles that are no longer relevant.
  • I have posted 158 Tips, Tricks and Thoughts on the site in the last few months.
  • There are nearly 40,899 comments on the articles, of which I wrote a bit over 13,116, mostly as answers.
  • We have 5374 paying members, but before you get too excited after doing the mental arithmetic, remember that most are still at legacy pricing and we have the considerable overhead of a real business to pay out of that.
  • In the last 12 months, 194,098 separate users visited the site 356,703 times, and viewed just under a million pages.
    • In fact, the numbers are much higher than that because in recent years many users have opted out of Google Analytics tracking.
    • Don’t worry, we are not tracking you personally.

The Future

Given that I will be 72 in June—Phyllis is way, way, way younger [not that much younger! Ed.]—I think we can safely say that another 20 years of AAC, at least with me at the helm, is a tad unlikely.

That said, I’m still full of enthusiasm for almost all aspects of the job—just don’t get me started on tax and privacy compliance and administration—particularly the writing and figuring out how to make the site design ever better, with lots of cool improvements already on the schedule for next winter.

I did have a moment of panic a few months ago that my well of ideas for new articles was drying up, so I started a list of topics that I needed to cover. After two days it had 24 items on it, most of which will take at least two articles to cover properly, so I stopped because I was getting anxious about how I would get it all done!

Thank You

Thanks to all of you who have made, and continue to make, this amazing journey possible.

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Colin Speedie

And a huge thank you to both John and Phyllis for their hard work and ever generous support for this writer over the years.

It has been an undiluted pleasure.

Thanks, too, to all the great AAC readers who have commented sagely over the years on my content. That makes it so worthwhile.

Here’s to next twenty years.

Alastair Currie

Thanks for the history review. Nice to see how it all started and developed.
Big thanks for the shear effort in producing this information and maintaining relevancy as tech and techniques change. A great resource, worth every penny.

Thom Unger

As one of those legacy readers who gladly upped from $20 to $36 and still find it a fantastic deal, I just want to thank you and the gang for all the hard work you’ve put in here. I’d also encourage other legacy readers to cough up another $16 a year 🙂 If you own a boat, or even if you’re just thinking about it, $36 is a trivial amount. The knowledge I’ve gained here has been invaluable!

Michael Feiertag

Well said.

Daniel McCarty

Agreed. I up my subscription when I read about it a while back since what I was paying was too low.

Flip side, I refer people to the site fairly frequently, especially when the cost of owning a boat conversation appear, so maybe John should pay me a finders fee! 🙂

I do hope my references to Morgan’s Cloud increases the paid subscribers since the website is truly a treasure trove of information.

I would love to overwinter in Norway, the wife on the other hand is too sensitive to the cold…

Michael Feiertag

Now that we have progressed to essentially full-time cruising, hardly a day goes by that I am not reminded of the value of AAC. Many of the procedures and habits that make our cruising safer and more pleasant stem from this resource.

Thank you.

Carolyn Rosner

Thanks for the great history of the whole project, especially the vintage website photos. There is no other cruising site out there quite like this one. Loads of useful information, with the bonus of the most thoughtful and kindest comments section on the interwebs — it’s actually populated by grownups! Congratulations on 20 years!

Ann Bainbridge

We’d also like to express gratitude for the existence of AAC and all the work you’ve done over the last twenty years.

When we bought our first cruising boat in 2008 (a Bab35) we started researching destinations. At that time we weren’t interested in tropical islands. When we read on your site that the
water doesn’t freeze solid in Tromsø at 69N (a revelation) and about the great quality of life there, we immediately knew that was the first place we’d head for. So, in June 2010, we sailed from Savannah GA (we’re Canadian but bought our boat there)
direct to Bergen, Norway with one stop in Stornoway, Scotland. We then used your excellent Norwegian Cruising Guide to get through the intricacies and wonders of the coastline heading north to Tromsø. We lucked out with the September weather and had the most fabulous coastal cruise. We pulled into Tromso in October just as the weather changed. We hunkered down and waited to experience the two months without sun. Every day there was fascinating. The following June we headed further north to Svalbard, another delight. This first year of our cruising life remains our favourite.

The knowledge on your site also gave us the confidence to invest in two later aluminum cruising boats which proved more suitable for other Arctic adventures. A sincere thank you for showing us the possibilities and for providing the experience and information to enable us to make it happen!

Ernest E Vogelsinger

Congrats to the first twenty!

And “thank you for your service”, your and the accumulated knowledge at AAC was, and still is and will be in the time to come, not only of help, but made it possible at all to start re-fitting out an older boat and still remainingattainable.

Thanks for all, and my glass to AAC, and both of you!

Stein Varjord

Congratulations Phyllis and John!

And thanks a lot for having created by far the worlds best knowledge resource for ocean cruisers. At least to my knowledge, there is nothing else out there coming close. This is a gold mine.

As serious sailors, we know we can never know it all. Wee must always develop our knowledge, skills, methods, equipment, etc. Even knowing that, we may be complacent. AAC makes it way easier to stay aware of our shortcomings and how to improve them.

Apart from the above reasons, the other subscribers/members and their friendly and polite tone sharing their questions and wisdom is an essential motivation. Thanks to you too! I discovered morganscloud about when you transitioned into a payment site, and I will remain here as long as I float. 🙂

Philip Wilkie

In the select company of the people on this site, I frequently suffer an intense sense of imposter syndrome; yet so much of what I have read has genuinely shaped my idea of what cruising is really about. There is no other resource I am aware of with the same depth as AAC – and I shamelessly recommend it to everyone I think might be interested.

Alex Borodin

Congratulations!

This website is an invaluable resource to me. Thanks so much!

David Esser

Well that must mean I’m old…

But also, I’ve gotten so much value from this site over the years, learned so much, and avoided so many potholes, mistakes, costs, and miseries.

Sincere thanks and celebration of your contribution.

Ralph Rogers

Yay! Good on ya!
Ralph

Matt Wages

This seems the best post to leave my first comment.

AAC has been a most amazing resource as we plan to move from corporate jobs and mortgage payments to a life onboard. The knowledge, and vast amount of time and effort it must take to present it so thoroughly and clearly, by both the authors and commenters, is second to none. I even rave about this site to people who have never set foot on a sailboat.

This site, in addition to Colin’s invaluable council, has put us mere days away from closing on a 44’ aluminum centerboard cutter. With the aid of this site and its participants I have confidence our refit (refresh?) will go at least slightly better than “Bob’s”.

Congratulations to you John and Phyllis! And thank you all. I hope to have more to add to the conversation in the future. Cheers.

James Peto

Your Photograph of Tromso reminded me of a very happy three years cruising the Norweigian Coast including Svalbard.
Sadly,being somewhat older than you those days are behind us.
The Cruising Guide was a fantastic aid..
Thank you for all the advice ver the years.

Rene Blei

Congratulations John and Phyllis with this important 20 year milestone.
Many of your members must have smiled reading your resume of the last 20 years, recognizing the difficult choices to make
and the many sleepless nights. But now you can look back on a succesful enterprise. Some call it luck, some call it blessings, but to be lucky still involves making choices.

A very successful couple drove up in their expensive car to a service station. Then the lady pointed out a man in his coveralls to her husband. “I used to date him” she said. “Well, honey, arent you happy you picked me!” her husband remarked.
To which she replied, “If I had picked him, you would now be the guy in coveralls”
And so the old saying goes, “Behind most good men, you’ll often find better women.
Stay true and keep up the good work !!

Neil McCubbin

It is hard to add to all the foregoing compliments, so I’ll just agree with them

Olivier Le Carbonnier

bonjour et merci.
de loin la meilleure revue nautique que je connaisse.
les articles techniques sont vraiment excellents et pratiques.