Happy New Year…and more news

I want to wish you all a Happy, Healthy and Fishy 2013.

I am very excited about what this year will bring and if my elbow stops hurting at some point, I might even get a little more excited. Hopefully this therapy will do and if it does not, the cortisone will have to do next month.

I hope all of you got all the gifts you wanted, I hope you enjoyed the holidays with your families and I know that many of you can’t wait for another season to get going. I hope we see many of you at the shows this winter. We will be at RISAA in Providence this year, I am honored that they asked me to speak and I am looking forward to return trip after few years of absence.

Let’s take a quick peak of what we at the Surfcaster’s Journal have in store for you. Tommy is working on our first issue in the new vertical format. All I heard from him was that “it looks sick”. I think he is reenergized to do something different. I am happy that for the first time we will have a true flip viewer for the tablets. We are also redesigning the whole website which should debut with a new issue. As we told you before, the SJ in 2013 will be a subscription magazine while the blog will stay where it is. We have some ideas for blog too but right now we are trying to get the magazine and new website and layout complete before we moved on to other things. Our new managing editor Dave Anderson has a lot of ideas that he wants to implement but like I said, they too will have to wait until we launch our first issue in a week or so.

I wrote yesterday that John Skinner will become a columnist starting with March issue, something that we are excited and honored to bring to you. In addition, I will be working this winter on creating episodes of the Montauk Surfcasters Time and Tide original series, which will encompass surf fishing in Montauk from WWII to today. Each issues starting in March will feature one original episode that will be made exclusively for the subscribers of SJ.

In addition to this original series, there will be more original videos embedded into the SJ just for readers. I spent this past weekend in Connecticut with Ron DiCostanzo, maker of Lordship Lures and also of the ZeeBaaS fame. We shot few videos on making wooden lures , from offset drilling to sealing lures, making tail twists and other stuff. These videos will also appear in the each issue of SJ in 2013. But that is not all (now I am starting to sound like an infomercial :-)). I will also be making some more original content for SJ with our Rod Guru Lou Caruso in few days. What I envision SJ to be is a very media rich publication, with original programming that you won’t find anywhere else. I hope that we can deliver the content you guys crave and fulfill not only ours but your expectations too. I hope that you support us as we embark on the new chapter for Surfcaster’s Journal. In this issue we have as a centerpiece a long and very detailed interview with Don Musso from Super Strike Lures. From his days of woodcarving little swimmers in 1961 to his break up with Dan Pichney and reason behind it all the way through today, a reflection on his glorious career as lure builder and his contribution to the sport of surf casting.

Here is a little video on what is coming up in the next issue

[youtube]http://youtu.be/AZJ6YuPrHPU[/youtube]