SpinSheet: “We were on a mission”

Sailing communities with a regional publication are lucky, and Chesapeake Bay has one of the finest which is celebrating a significant anniversary:

Thirty years ago this month, the premier issue of SpinSheet hit the docks. Except for the cover, the 56-page issue was on black-and-white newsprint. Co-founder Dave Gendell wrote most of the articles. Co-founder Mary Iliff Ewenson sold the ads, and those first advertisers paid up front. Imagine being a local marine business willing to pay in advance for a product that had yet to exist! Our amazing sailing community believed in those two determined 20-something Annapolis sailors who made it happen.

About the first 1995 SpinSheet cover, Dave says, “It was from a slide of a J/22 regatta off Annapolis. It was a drama getting the slides scanned as we didn’t have a scanner. We went to a professional photo studio to have it scanned and burned to a CD.

“We didn’t know when the second issue would come out, so we chose to call it ‘the premier issue’ instead of the August or September issue. We didn’t have the capability of doing the layout of the cover on the one computer we shared, so we did that part at the printer in Philadelphia in the final hour.” – Full report