Running Aground on Reader Opinion

As boaties, much of our activity is ruled by the tides. The ins, the outs, the ups the downs – how much water over the bar at the end of the estuary –  the bite times for fishing, how much anchor warp do we need to put down and all that.

We all scour the tidal charts don’t we? It’s the same with the weather. Tides and weather, the predictions by which we gauge potential boating opportunities.

So you can understand that having a page of tidal information in a magazine is a drawcard for readers, a sure thing for selling the mag. At the very least it’s a service for readers. And you wouldn’t want cut out your tidal pages without putting up some sort of fight - and that’s precisely the situation that led me to an ugly encounter with an angry reader while tucked up in Smokehouse Bay, with a rum in my hand, aboard the Young 11, Diamond Knife.

The boatbuilders wanted me to trial the boat, which had a highly innovative and stylized interior courtesy of Craig Loomes. Craig has since gone on to create some truly amazing boats – including the big game fishing machine “Ultimate Lady” and Peter Bethune’s “Earthrace,” current holder of the around the world record for a powerboat. But back then he was a boatbuilder and he’d created something special with this yacht.

But I digress. The tidal “situation” started way back when the Ministry of Tides, or whatever the quaint Government department was called when it employed 19,000 people whose job was to make the tides go in and out. Governments did everything in those days and taxpayers didn’t seem to mind being fleeced by them to employ thousands more people than they needed to get everything done.

Sea Spray magazine got permission to publish the tidal information in about 1950, and did so every month as a service. The Ministry of Tides employees were happy to have something to show for their weekly labours.  In the 1980s the new Government focus on charging taxpayers a second time to use the services they had already funded – the so-called ‘user-pays’ – was applied to tidal information.

They were the original Somalian pirates these buggers, and wanted a massive ransom for the magazine to publish the tidal charts. They had no other way of spreading the tidal word, apart from some dinky little books and a pull-out page of tides published in the NZ Herald every year just before summer. The Herald supplement was our bible and was duly fixed by sellotape to the back of a kitchen cupboard, pored over and consulted over the next 12 months for the best tides. Other people used the Sea Spray tide charts every month.

But back to the Pirates. I don’t recall the exact figure they demanded for their information but it was outrageous and certainly more than the magazine could afford.

Faced with this pirate-sized demand to publish the information we decided to keep quiet and keep doing what we’d always done. The demand for money had been delivered to another marine magazine when they asked if they could publish the tides – so we knew about it but because we had not been officially and formally told to pay, we figured we’d keep on publishing the tides until the pirates hove into view across the horizon with their AK47s, at which time we’d drop the whole idea.

 It was about then I hit a proverbial customer relations sandbank at low tide. It came during a call from a loyal reader who asked why we couldn’t increase the typeface and also include more ports in the info. He was quite right, because we published in about six point type to fit it all in - meaning the type  was about the size of the head on a small pin. You needed a magnifying glass to read it, but that’s the way it had always been done.  I’m ashamed to say the reader and I ended up in a bit of a stoush about it, with me making some excuse that was barely believable. The truth was, I was concerned that any change to the way Sea Spray presented the tides might be seen by Treasury as a way of wiping out the national debt.

Fast forward a few weeks. We are sitting on “Diamond Knife” on a balmy evening enjoying fresh crays, scallops and rum when a couple of old blokes from the next boat row over for a bit of socialising.

It didn’t take long before one of them was telling us what a bastard the editor of Sea Spray was. I motioned “silence” to the rest of the crew by dragging an imaginary knife across my throat, as we listened with great interest.

Seems he’d phoned this asshole of an editor with a perfectly good suggestion about the tidal pages and had received a totally uncalled for broadside over the phone.

It went on for some time, me resembling a beetroot with embarrassment and nervously hoping he wouldn’t cotton on. Never was good in a fight, me. Craig and Nigel suppressed great mirth, spluttering and sniggering, until eventually the old bugger rowed back to his boat, no doubt to tell lots of other people about the complete asshole at Sea Spray.

He’d already told three people on our boat and it made me wonder how many others he had told – when a magazine’s image is its credibility and the readers’ opinions of its editor are bloody important.

I never gave anyone an earful on the phone again, except Ken Lusty. The “discussions” I had with Ken were monumental, but never became personal and were always entertaining.