Who's Your Daddy?

So who is the Daddy of sailing blogs? Who started the first sailing blog? Who wrote the first blog post about sailing?

It's hard to know for sure. Weblogs have been around since 1998. Some blogs may have been abandoned or been deleted. Some bloggers may have deleted their earlier archives or changed platforms and not transferred archives. And the only way I can think of to research this question is to look back in the archives of currently active blogs.

So with those reservations what can we discover? Some of the sailing blogs that were around in the early days when I were blogging such as EVK4 Bloglet and Zephyr have sailing stories in their archives dating back to early 2005. Are there any earlier sailing blogs?

Ahah. Sherry Fowler's Stay of Execution, though by no means a blog purely about sailing, has sailing stories dating back to September 2003. Ah, but Ant Clay at Soulsailor goes back even further with a post from May 2003 about boat names which told the world that the Enterprise owned by his crew was named Sofa King Lazy. (Say it quickly -- unless there are kids about in which case don't say it at all.) So is Ant the Grand Daddy of all sailing bloggers?

Not so fast. There's someone who has been blogging about sailing for even longer than Ant. Yeah, Rohan Veal has been blogging about sailing since January 2003. The oldest entry in his archives is a link to an account of how he won the 51st Australian Moth Championships. It dates from 13 January 2003. And Rohan is still blogging about Moth sailing and promoting sales of the Bladerider for KA Sail around the world.

So can anyone beat that? Or is Rohan the Daddy of All Sailing Bloggers?