Sailpost becomes WindAssist

Ever since we relaunched the Zeilpost, we have been thinking about the editorial formula and our readership. The smallest among the ‘Posts’ could also become the biggest, but how?

The Zeilpost was created by Wouter as a stage for a growing fascination of his: the world of sail cargo, and the growing number of initiatives to equip ‘ordinary’ merchant vessels, such as cruising liners, container ships and car carriers, with some form of sail support. This fascination is shared by the editors. The Enkhuizen Nautical College (ECN), represented on the board of the Zeepost Foundation, is seeing increasing attention to WASP: Wind-Assisted Ship Propulsion, which is becoming a whole new field within the sailing world, and there are more and more press releases from major shipping companies that are equipping part of their fleet with new sailing technology. For now, this yields a fairly marginal eco-gain by sailor standards, but that there is an irreversible trend is becoming increasingly clear.

Overlap with Zeepost

The question, of course, is whether there are enough readers waiting for that news. Since the circle of the really interested is relatively small for the time being, the Zeilpost reports not only on sail cargo and wind support, but also on tall-ship trips and sail training. There is an overlap there with the Zeepost, which also highlights the latter two topics, which regularly causes double coverage in those two Posts. However, the interest of those working on these four areas of interest is quite international, takes place mainly at sea, and there is a fair amount of crossover between officers in the merchant navy and in large sailing. We therefore feel justified in continuing to highlight those focus areas all in the Zeilpost.

Only news medium in the world

From the outset, we were convinced that the Zeilpost could also have a wider international reach, but that language was an obstacle to this. The desire to make the site bilingual was therefore extensively investigated by our webmaster Willem, and a fully bilingual site is now running in the background along with the Zeilpost. This site will also immediately be given an international name: WindAssist. It is not yet ready to go public, as there is still too much work to be done ‘under the bonnet’, but we have made a start and hope to be able to announce the official launch of the bilingual WindAssist soon. This will then also fulfil a wish partly initiated by Cosmo Wassenaar, the ENC director who holds wind-assisted merchant shipping very dear: with WindAssist, perhaps the only news medium in the world that has wind-assisted shipping as its main subject will be created. And if the WASP trend continues, this may even give the wind-assisted shipping a much wider reach than the Zeepost and Scheepspost. That does not make those two other pillars under the foundation any less important, but it does create an interesting new perspective.

Windassist sponsor