Publisher launches Web-based cruising service

John Hanson is known for his ideas. Some of them are pretty weird. Like creating the World Championship Boatyard Dog Trials at the annual Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors Boat Show in Rockland. Or, at the same show, putting on zucchini-boat races and paddleboard jousting.

His latest idea is one of his biggest. In September 2011, Hanson, the publisher of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine, launched USHarbors.com, an interactive cruising guide of 1,120 harbors that includes weather, tidal and buoy data, radar maps and nautical charts alongside tips from sailors and bloggers on places to stop while in port. USHarbors competes with other online cruise guides like ActiveCaptain.com, Marinas.com and BlooSee.com that serve boaters who are online while underway.

On a recent afternoon, Hanson, dressed in cargo pants, a cotton shirt and a quilted Barbour vest, ushers a visitor into his office in the Victorian duplex that serves as the headquarters of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors and now USHarbors.com. The space is cluttered with piles of magazines, family photos, an oversized joke cover of the magazine depicting Hanson in red foul weather gear leaping on a beach, heels-clasped, Gene Kelly-like, grinning wildly. A large brass telescope called Captain Nemo points out the window at Rockland Harbor and on the wall, standing out even amid this crush of tchotchke, is a whimsical model of a port called "City of False Teeth" made by one of Hanson's favorite artists, Ripley-based Wally Warren.

"I love Wally's work," Hanson says, standing in front of "City." "How does someone envision a port? And that is Wally's port."

Wally's port is a busy mix of household items reappropriated. A piece of leather belt acts as a bridge, a miniature travel toothbrush chugs out to sea, keyboard keys line the shore like tenement buildings, and a plastic ice cream cone that was once part of a toy is now an oil refinery. Things you've seen before, but not like you've ever seen them before.

It's an appropriate focal point for a man known for his creativity.

"He has an idea every single minute," says Carl Cramer, publisher of WoodenBoat magazine, where Hanson was ad director from 1976-1987. "We talk every couple of days; he'll have an idea that he wants to run by me and I'll run ideas by him."

One of those ideas was USHarbors, which is attracting between 200,000 and 400,000 visitors each month and has generated $150,000 in ad revenue, all without any marketing. The thinking is that young readers are online and Hanson, though an old-fashioned print man, knows to tack when the wind changes.

"Most marine magazine readers right now are probably, average age, well over 55," says Hanson. "A bunch of old farts. And that's cool, there's still a bunch of buying years left, but if we want to grow to a new audience we have to go on the Web."

Signal changes

Phin Sprague, president of the boatyard Portland Yacht Services, remembers when sailors relied on the tom-tom. The tom-tom, named after the tribal communication drum, is what sailors called the tips and warnings about harbors they'd exchange among themselves.

"Who are the good people in each harbor, who are the people to stay away from?" Sprague explains. "What are the issues in each place, the assets in each place? That was done word-of-mouth of over the single side band radio."

From the tom-tom, sailors might hear about the prettiest coves to visit, strange currents to avoid or which skippers were suspected of stealing.

"It was very much a sort of prairie circle-the-wagons community," he says.

Sprague has run Portland Yacht Services since 1981. He says in the past few years more and more boaters have begun supplementing their tom-tom gossiping with updated data online. So when Hanson called him with the idea for USHarbors.com a few years ago, Sprague told him he didn't really understand all of that technology stuff but it sounded pretty useful. At the very least, Sprague says, Hanson's site would get word out to boaters about harbors in Maine, which could mean more interest in both men's businesses.

"John is a marketing person and he really understands that in order for the marketed thing to be successful you have to brand it," says Sprague. "He has worked really hard to brand the quality of the Maine boatbuilders and it's throughout everything that he does. He's been sort of waging a one-person battle to really put Maine boatbuilder in the forefront."

John K. Hanson Jr. was born in New York City in 1951 and spent his childhood in nearby Rumson, N.J. He got into boating young and at age 7 bought his first outboard motor, a 3-hp Evinrude Light Twin Engine, with $68 in First Communion money. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1973 with a degree in theology, he moved to Southwest Harbor to take a job scraping paint off the bottom of boats at the Hinckley Co. From the old salts at Hinckley, Hanson learned the colorful, curse-laden manner of speech that's allowed him to move as a native among boatbuilders of all stripes. It's an affect that has since become second nature and shows that Hanson's knack for branding extends even to himself. He's a salesman of the sea, sharp as barnacles.

Despite his affinity for boat culture, after a brief stint as an independent wooden boatbuilder, Hanson discovered that he wasn't particularly good at putting them together. So in 1976, he joined WoodenBoat magazine as its ad director. Then, during a cruise through the Fox Island Thorofare with his then-wife and artist friends in the mid-80s, the conversation turned to Maine's boating culture, coastal architecture and art when two porpoises surfaced off the bow. Hanson had an idea.

"There were all these different strands of what made life intriguing to me all at once — wildlife, architecture, boats," he says. "I figured that this was the magazine I wanted to do. I wanted to write about all of these aspects and facets of life on the coast."

Hanson stepped down in 1987 as ad director to launch Maine Boats and Harbors magazine, though he kept about 50 of his favorite clients, accounts he still maintains 25 years into running what's now called Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine.

Today, Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors is a $1.4 million company publishing five issues annually and running what might be one of the quirkiest boat shows in the country every August in Rockland Harbor. Hanson expects that in a year, USHarbors will boost the MBHH total revenue by $250,000, about as much as the boat show contributes. In a few years, as USHarbors fleshes out the local travel tips for harbors around the country, Hanson hopes the site's revenue will grow to upwards of $2 million annually.

Beyond the moneymaking opportunity, Hanson hopes USHarbors can build coastal community and environmental awareness. It's "some weird altruistic [stuff]," he says, that he blames on his theology degree.

"All of a sudden there's a potential for a voice that's never been used before," he says of the site. "And it could be done regionally, locally and nationally. I mean it's a really, really powerful community-building tool. I like to say we're purely profit -driven, but there is this unbelievable opportunity to do some good things."

A national market

USHarbors.com is an offshoot of MaineHarbors.com, a simple tides and weather site that Hanson bought five years ago from Kennebunk businessman John Standish. At the time, MaineHarbors.com was generating about 40,000 visitors a month and was making, Hanson says, basically nothing. But Hanson figured that without much effort he could bundle his affluent readership with the boating community devoted to MaineHarbors and start to pull in some ad revenue. Then his web director at the time, Jamie Bloomquist, came to him with a bigger idea — why not redesign the site with a national cruising audience in mind, with information tailored for each harbor?

"Boaters had a very strong affinity for their home port," says Bloomquist, now president of USHarbors. "It's their place, they have a personal ownership of it, they want to share info about it, they're proud of it, and so by building it around these harbors where they have a concentration of people who spend time on the coast — boaters, kayakers, birders, photographers and all of the above — you find the group of people that are attracted to [that harbor]."

Bloomquist, a self-described power-boater, and USHarbors.com Editor Joshua Moore, a self-described sailor, share a small office in the building Hanson owns in Rockland that also houses Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors and a neighborhood market called Sweets & Meats. From this office, Moore and Bloomquist research harbors from Maine to Hawaii. The weather, buoy, tidal and chart data are automated, but the blog posts and interactive Google maps are curated, meaning Moore edits all content and pulls questionable comments. The prospect of helming the ship for the entire country is understandably daunting. For the time being, only New England harbors have information beyond the automated tidal, weather and buoy data, which is why Hanson, Moore and Bloomquist still consider USHarbors primarily a New England site with aspirations for a national market.

Hanson may want to look 30 miles west in Nobleboro for his guide. There, the husband and wife team Bruce and Pamela Harris operate one of the world's most popular online cruising sites, Marinas.com, which attracts five million unique visits a year. Marinas.com is primarily a slip reservation service for 16,500 marinas in North America, Canada, the Caribbean and Europe. But like USHarbors it also is a travel guide for boaters and a resource for weather, tidal and other nautical information. Marinas.com is the central offering of a multi-pronged, $5 million to $10 million company called GMV Holdings which also licenses photographs and cartography to navigation companies. Managing Partner Bruce Harris says the site since 2005 has consistently increased its annual unique visits by 20% thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign on Google and other search engines and a small but dedicated cadre of editorial, sales and programming contractors around the country.

But becoming a go-to website isn't easy. Harris says he and his staff are constantly coming up with new ways to maximize the site's searchability. Then there are the 100,000 pages of data his staff needs to monitor and update. But the biggest challenge to making a site like this stick is to distinguish it from the 300 million or so websites in existence.

"It's very difficult to grow a new business on the Internet," Harris says. "It's very difficult to get that exposure."

Hanson's had enough early success not to worry yet about marketing, and he's instead worrying now about how to curate content and generate ad sales in Florida, a wealthy boating market with plenty of seabird ties to Maine. He's not sure whether to partner with local writers and salespeople for Florida content — perhaps even to partner with a local trade magazine —which would mean sharing revenue, or to expand the Rockland staff to continue to oversee all content and sales from Maine and, as he puts it, "keep all the money." Or, he could do both.

As Phin Sprague puts it, Hanson's bit himself off quite a cow.

"I think that he's been known to take on big projects that take a little while to digest," says Sprague. "If you want to eat a cow you got to do it one bite at a time. But John, he's perfectly willing to start to digest a cow."

Sarah Anne Donnelly, a writer based in Portland, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.