Rat Tales

More than a year ago I purchased SeriousOffshore.com to keep the site open as a friendly place where all performance boaters could chat with each other as if they were all in one of our living rooms with munchies and drinks. That was the main reason Serious was started, and the main reason it became so popular.

After some rapid growth, many things changed in a very short time. As one of the initial founders, and one of the site moderators, I strongly felt the site's "living room atmosphere" needed to stay as a place for performance boaters to chat without the personal attack atmosphere so prevalent elsewhere. But in the case of first hand issues with boaters and boating businesses we always do everything in our power to assist in fair, and amicable, resolutions.

When I purchased the site, some folks advised me to simply start another new one. I was advised by others to go ahead and purchase it, but immediately release a press notice so everyone would know what the ownership was. I didn’t do either. I purchased it and decided to just let the site proceed as it was. One reason was I wanted to see how things shook out. But I also wanted to make a couple changes and improvements that I had envisioned before announcing the ownership change.

At that time I started making plans to implement some changes and improvements to Serious. There were several great ideas the Serious Management Group had discussed, several of which have already been implemented. The "Inside" newsmagazine is one of those ideas, which has incidentally become popular on other sites in the meantime. Unfortunately, being a boater and member owned, small budget site, rather than being part of a corporate monster, things didn’t move as quickly as I might have hoped.
Over the next 2-3 weeks, we will be tweaking some improvements to Serious and, with the help of members, new and old, we will have fun with some of the new features we will be implementing. One small change will be the overall name. As an avid high performance boater, I have owned and driven many types of performance boats. From Jet skis, to knee bangers, to outboards, and offshore; I can honestly say there is not a single one I have been sorry about. So, in keeping with our performance boating welcome to all aspects of the sport, and our SOS nickname, Serious Offshore has added the word Sports to our name. But, called SOS or Serious, we will endeavor to continue to be an asset and a resource to all types of performance boaters.

I want to thank the Administrators, Moderators and especially the members for the years of service to the Serious community. Very special thanks go out to Jason "Hellbent.” Without his hard work over the past year, we wouldn’t be ready to roll out the new changes and may not even have survived. Fighting off recent hacker activity across the forum world and working with non-tested updates certainly kept him busy. Because of Jason and all of you, we have grown our membership to 8000 plus. As we enter a new day for Serious, my hope is that it still sets the example by being a leader in both innovation and ethics. Whether you have been with us for the entire journey, joined us along the way, our are one of our new friends, we are grateful that you are part of our community.

Sincerely,

Paul "Ratickle" Rose