Congratulations

What's the point in blogging? Where's the payback? I'm sure you have lots of answers. But one of our little community of sailors-who-blog has recently had a very special reward that came (at least indirectly) from her blogging activity.

Sherry Fowler's Stay of Execution was on on my first list of Top Ten Sailing Blogs. To be honest it never was a one-dimensional sailing blog. Sherry used to write about many aspects of her life: work, friends, family, books, music and so on... and occasionally about sailing her Etchells or her job as a college sailing coach. She made the top ten list because she is an extraordinarily talented writer who can make the most mundane aspects of life into an interesting read, and her occasional posts on sailing made up in quality for what we may have missed in quantity.

Sherry only touched obliquely in her blog on her personal relationships with the men in her life. But over time we read occasional sad posts where she pondered on whether she ever would find her soul-mate and indeed whether she was even capable of a long-term relationship. A few months ago we gathered that there was a new man in her life (code name NBT for Next Big Thing). We also learned that they met because he read her blog and that he lives in North Carolina; Sherry lives in Maine and often wrote about her love for coastal Maine and how it would be hard for her ever to tear herself away from everything she loves in that place. Her regular readers gave her much ill-informed (and probably unwelcome) advice on the relationship as it seemed that there were considerable geographical obstacles in the way of a happy outcome.

In December Sherry abruptly killed Stay of Execution after writing over 2600 posts in more than three years. Her final post was a Sherry classic of self-awareness entitled What I've Learned From My Blog, or My Yellow Underpants. But she started a new blog in a completely new style, posting photos of random scenes and objects she observed and only short pieces of writing. This week we learned on Stay in a brief announcement from Sherry that "NBT proposed last weekend, and I accepted. That's right. I met my future husband on the Internet."

Congratulations to the happy couple. Let's hope we will be reading many more posts on Sherry's blog -- and perhaps occasionally even one or two gems about sailing.