Hi Tom,

...when was the last time you saw a cover shot for CW that showed a "real" cruising boat, in a "real" cruising situation, like they used to run, way back when? Every boat now featured appears straight out of a Boat Show, beautifully shot by someone like Billy Black or Ali Langley, but much more akin to advertising photography, as opposed to editorial... The only "scenes" or destinations featured anymore all seem to be charter destinations, and I'll bet it's been an LONG time since a CW cover boat was shown sporting so much as that most basic cruising necessity, a tender... Or, at least, they're all neatly tucked away in massive stern garages on today's Mom $ Pop cruiser from Lyman-Morse, or whoever...

I still love CW, IMHO it is still far and away the best glossy cruising rag out there, but like any other mass-market consumer magazine trying to make it in an increasingly competitive market, they're pushing The Dream, bigtime, while serving as touts for advertisers like Morris & The Moorings... There's nothing inherently evil in that, it's simply the way things are in, the words of the late Sy Syms could be instructive here - "An educated consumer is our best customer..." (grin)

Magazine covers reflect what's happened to our culture, our inability to distinguish images that illuminate from those designed to sell... What else would one expect from a generation of boomers and others with an excess of disposable funds burning holes in their pockets, and the eagerness to believe the latest cover shot reflects The Way It REALLY Is out there? (grin)

BTW, Tom, here's a funny take on the Morris 52 you'll appreciate.... I was out in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, spent a day sailing on the bay out of Alameda with a friend of my brother's ... Walking the docks at the marina, we were oogling a M-36, and also one of the few Morris 34's ever built, a magnificent boat with the deckhouse finished bright, I think they were the first Morris' my nephews had ever seen up close... when we got back home, they wanted to check out the Morris website right away...

I had the latest CW with the feature on the 52, so I showed that to them as well... One of them, looking at the beautiful spread photo that leads the feature, pointed to one of the young girls seated on the foredeck, and mused "so, what do you think? will her 16th birthday present be a Porsche, or a BMW?" (grin)

I've worked hard on them, always considered it was one of my principal duties as an uncle who just happened to be a photographer, to make them aware of the distinction between editorial and advertising photography.... LOL!

best regards,

Jon