Re: Best Boating Magazines
Just read that Trailer Boats was discontinued in June of this year. I had never heard of it. Maybe if I had it wouldnt have been discontinued:facepalm:
I had just bought my first new boat in the Summer of 1971. On my way home from the dealer I stopped in a drugstore and found Trailerboats volume 1 issue 1. To my surprise, the very boat I just bought was tested that month and featured on the cover.
I became a charter subscriber that day and I currently own every single issue they ever published, all bound and indexed by year.
In subsequent years I hardly saw them on news stands. I think they survived mostly by subscriptions.
They specialized in only boats that could be trailered. Although you might say they are (were) advitorials as well (and maybe never said bad things about what they tested), they DID provide all the data so that you could read between the lines and make informed decisions of your own.
I had the pleasure of meeting their publisher and technical editor at a Stingray open house a few years ago. I candidly complained to them at the time that the magazine had gone downhill in recent years (after the company was sold by the original publisher and picked up by a conglomerate). Its just a matter of dollars and cents today. Like many of the newspapers, the (free) internet is driving the printed media out of business.
In any event, I learned a lot from them over the past 40 years - my own tests always confirmed their results. Sorry to see them go!
