Destination Southampton for your friendly magazine team
Southampton Boat Show opens tomorrow, Friday 16 September, and PBO can hardly wait.
We’ll be decamping, if not quite en masse then certainly in relays, the 37 miles across the New Forest from our Poole office to what will be home-from-home for the next 10 days.
The IPC Media stand E001, right opposite the marina entrance, is where you’ll find at least one member of the PBO editorial staff, every afternoon of the Show, between 1-5pm. We’ll try to answer your questions and give advice (as best we can) and generally get to know our readers a little better.
By now most of us are old hands at the Show, but new boy Marco Rossi, our sub-editor since March, is a first-timer. He says he’s ‘looking forward to the whole experience, just finding out what it’s all about’. Editor’s PA Roz Jones ‘hopes to catch up with all the contributors’ who she often knows only by voice, and Production editor Julian Peckham, our boat-barbecue-test chef extraordinaire, is making a beeline for the Sea Kitchen Theatre. Meanwhile, Art editor Kevin Slater intends to photograph as many ‘boats, bits and interesting people’ as possible (he particularly enjoyed Katherine Jenkins’ performance at the Sunseeker launch last year…)
News & web ed Elizabeth Paine will be rushing round the Showground, Tweeting juicy snippets back to the IPC stand’s ‘Tweetwall’. You can join our big-screen Twitter action by Tweeting us your favourite show finds at @p_b_o using the hashtag #IPCSBS, or catch us on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/practicalboatownermag.
Of course, our main function at the Show is to report on all the latest new boats and equipment, and this is where our staff sailing specialists come in. David Pugh, Ben Meakins, David Harding and, naturally, Editor Sarah Norbury will be casting their expert eyes over the contents of the marquees and marina, strolling the stalls to find the best new products, and talking to leading lights in all matters marine. Their thoughts should make for interesting reading over the coming months.
So if you’re at the Show and see one of the faces in our ‘Meet the team at PBO’ gallery – easily spotted as we’ll all be sporting PBO-branded clothing too – come and say ‘Hi’… at least now you’ll know who we are!