Dear Professional BoatBuilder magazine subscribers,
After three months of uncertainty about the future of the boatbuilding industry’s technical journal, I’m happy to report that we will continue to publish in 2025. Our founding publishers at WoodenBoat Publications, who halted editorial production of ProBoat at the end of August, agreed to sell the magazine to the International Boatbuilder’s Exhibition and Conference (IBEX) in mid-November, closing the deal just as I and the IBEX team were in transit to METSTRADE in Amsterdam. What a relief it was to be able to tell the many friends and concerned readers, writers, and advertisers who stopped by our stand that the title would carry on.
Thank you all for the expressions of support and concern you sent our way since August. It is humbling, gratifying, and motivating to hear how important the magazine has been to you over the years and how dismayed many in the industry were at the prospect of its demise. There are other marine trade publications and sources of business information, but none focused on the practical technical processes of boatbuilding. “We need it. There’s nothing else like it!” I heard repeatedly. Thankfully the IBEX team heard it too and scrambled to assure that ProBoat would have a future as part of the show’s year-round commitment to providing essential professional information to boat designers, builders, and service technicians.
Since the acquisition, we’ve been gathering and evaluating the assets of ProBoat, including the full archive of magazines back to 1989, the accumulated online presence at proboat.com, collaborations with partner shows and industry events, and a vibrant community of loyal supporters and advertisers. Our immediate priority is to rebuild the editorial team (the core contributing writers and editors support our new effort) and reimagine how we can best deliver our brand of industry journalism to readers in a rapidly evolving publishing environment.
The hiatus in editorial function from August to late November means there will be no issue #212 landing in your inboxes this month, but we will be delivering new editorial content on the ProBoat.com website, IBEX 365, and through social media for the next two months. During that time, we’ll be soliciting new content from writers, planning editorial priorities, and engaging in extensive strategic planning to determine the appearance and shape of ProBoat for readers and advertisers in 2025.
We don’t know exactly what ProBoat will look like a year from now, but we know it will continue as the essential source of technical information for you and for the future marine professionals who will need it. To that end, I welcome your thoughts about how you’d like to receive our future content, subjects you’d like us to cover, voices you’d like to hear from on our platform, industry concerns that keep you up at night, and technologies and materials you think hold promise or peril for boatbuilders. Please share any ideas or observations with me at [email protected] or call me at (207) 266-7244.
I want to share my heartfelt thanks for your ongoing support and collaboration as we run ProBoat through a major refit before getting under way again, and my sincere belief that by addressing the industry’s collective needs we will continue to serve you well and to deserve your attention and respect. I look forward to working with you in 2025.
Happy Holidays,
Aaron Porter
Editorial Director, IBEX
Editor, Professional BoatBuilder magazine
