As many of you will know, the shutter plank is the last plank to be hung on the side of a wooden boat, and it’s an occasion for celebration because it means the hull is essentially complete. On the other hand, it’s just the completion of the first major component of the finished yacht and must be followed by the decks, the rig, etc.

And that pretty much sums up where we are. Major text behind us, major artwork underway. Manuscripts from around the world continually stream into the Blue Hill office for editing. We have a few writers who are running late, many who are running long, and some we’re running to catch up to. At times there is so much to be done that it seems overwhelming, but when we settle in to take each task one at a time, it seems to get done at a decent rate.

Enough of the book is drafted at this point that we are putting together binders of entries for the Editorial Board members to review and comment upon, in preparation for the final editing, and these should go out in the mail soon.

The Board has gotten big and broad, and we credit everyone on the list shown here for their willingness to volunteer their help to create this book - their reward is the knowledge that they’ve done something good for yachting.

We’ve also teamed up with some really great writers who are writing from their unique perspectives. Check out the list of writers on page 3. And it would be impossible to illustrate the Encyclopedia with 700 photos and drawings without our patrons, the Subscribers to the Limited Edition of the Encyclopedia, page 4.
And finally this newsletter aims to whet your appetite by including a few opening lines from representative entries: see pages 5 and 6.

Having ultimately established some of the limitations of "writing by wire," where Lucia and I were in contact almost entirely by e-mail and electronic file transfers, we are now spending at least two days a week working in direct contact. We alternate between the Knight’s architectural offices in Blue Hill and my little house, three hours east in the island city of Eastport. It’s a whole lot better for brainstorming and tackling minor problems as they come up, and it’s a lot more fun.

In this phase of the project I’ve written the majority of the entries that I am to write, and I’m now primarily editing entries from our other writers. I do this on a trusty laptop computer,
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