Celebrating Five Years

It seems many blogs do not last more than a few months and most do not make it past a year or more, yet today marks the beginning of SUMMIT TO SHORE’s sixth year!

My first post, “ex nihillo”,  went live January 5, 2009.  I have written over six hundred blog posts to SUMMMIT TO SHORE since then.  In addition I also posted to PRESBYTERIAN BLOGGERS  and SEBAGO CANOE CLUB.  Some of those cross posts were identical to the one’s I posted to SUMMIT TO SHORE and some were adapted.

While my frequency of posting has declined over the years, my posting has levelled off over the past two years to an average of 68.5.  During 2009, SUMMIT TO SHORES first year, I wrote 213 posts.  In 2010 I wrote 161 posts.  Posts declined to 90 during 2011, to 70 in 20012, and to 67 in 2013.  The most active month was July 2010 with 34 posts.  I have written over 600 posts to SUMMIT TO SHORE since its inception, an average of 120 posts per year, nearly double last year’s output.

In late 2010 I took over the authorship of the “Lectionary Ruminations” column on PRESBYTERIAN BLOGGERS and eventually started cross posting my “LECTIONARY RUMINATIONS” to SUMMIT TO SHORE.  After all the other contributors to PRESBYTERIAN BLOGGERS eventually stopped contributing, I too stopped posting to PRESBYTERIAN BLOGGERS but kept posting “Lectionary Ruminations” to SUMMIT TO SHORE.  Now that I have written posts for every Sunday in the three year lectionary I have renamed my column “LECTIONARY RUMINATIONS 2.0” as I revise and expand previous ruminations.

The most viewed post has been “We Sailed”, a post consisting of a photograph taken from the cockpit of “Mischief”, my 1983 C&C 24 sailboat, and a short poem I wrote about and after a day of sailing on New York City’s Jamaica Bay and lower New York Harbor.   That post has attracted nearly 2,000 hits, almost twice as many as the second most popular post, and I have yet to learn why.

While there have been fewer “summit” posts than “shore” posts these past few years, I expect the ratio to soon invert.  Over the past several months I have experienced major transitions in my life that have taken me from the shores of New York City and back to the mountains of West Virginia.  While I have no intention of abandoning sailing or coastal kayaking, I expect to be spending much more of my time over the next three or four years hiking and backpacking rather than sailing or paddling. I expect my posts to SUMMIT TO SHORE to reflect this change.