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MORE ABOUT AUTHOR BOB HALE
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Bob has been boating in the Northwest for nearly 50 of his 60+ years. As a teenager he rented sailboats at Madison Park in Seattle, and in his late 20s he began crewing on racing sailboats. He sailed his first Swiftsure race in 1969. In the early and middle 1970s he raced C-Lark sailing dinghies, finishing 3rd in the 1973 C-Lark Nationals. During that time he also raced on keelboats, competing in the Quarter-Ton North Americans in Vancouver, and becoming regular crew on the San Juan 30 "Outlaw," one of the top half-tonners in the Northwest at the time.
Being too poor to own a cruising boat, Bob's cruising consisted of delivering race boats to and from regattas around the Northwest, and borrowing boats he crewed aboard for family vacations. "Other people's boats" took Bob from Olympia, at the south end of Puget Sound, to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. A person who wants to go cruising can find a way.
 In 1973 Bob left a promising career in real estate management to pursue a dream of writing and photography, first as a free-lancer, then, from 1978-80, as editor of Nor'westing, at the time the leading Northwest boating magazine.
In 1981, with three kids to put through college, Bob gave up the hardscrabble writing field to found Robert Hale & Co., marine manufacturers' representatives. With his publishing background, he soon was drawn into selling boating books as well. The new company, which began with nothing to sell and no one to sell it to, grew to become the world's largest specialty wholesaler of nautical books -- this along with becoming one of the major marine hardware sales representatives in the Northwest.
The publishing bug, if it's in a person, may lie dormant for a while, but it does not die. Bob saw a need for a new kind of waypoint guide for what was then Loran electronic navigation. Bob and his wife Marilynn, in their Tollycraft 26 powerboat, spent four weeks criss-crossing Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands to create the first Weatherly Waypoint Guide, which came out to instant rave reviews and market success.
The following year, 1993, they spent another four weeks in British Columbia's Gulf Islands and Strait of Georgia, researching a second volume of the Weatherly Waypoint Guide. It was on this trip that they felt keenly the need for a new kind of local boating guidebook -- more readable and complete, better organized, and graphically superior to other guides that were on the market. That led in June, 1994, to the first edition of the Waggoner Cruising Guide, assembled with the considerable help of Tom Kincaid, Bob's former boss at Nor'westing.
In 1994 Bob and Marilynn spent six weeks cruising the waters to the north tip of Vancouver Island. On their return, Bob realized that this new guidebook would take most of his time, and he would not be able to continue as a major manufacturers representative. On his first day back at work he resigned all but a small core of his lines, giving up secure income to plunge headlong into the challenge and thrill of producing a new boating guide for the Northwest. The nautical book wholesale side was left untouched, and today remains the largest such wholesaler in the world.
Through all the twists and turns, Marilynn Hale has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Bob, relishing in the adventure of creating new things and setting out on uncharted paths. Marilynn loves boating, and enjoys as much as Bob the excitement of seeing new places, meeting new people, and navigating new waterways.
Except, that is, for the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Marilynn won't go out there, and none of Bob's pleadings has been sufficient to change her mind. Bob has had two easy trips down the West Coast of Vancouver Island, but Marilynn says nope, she won't go.
The Waggoner has become by far the best selling and most popular boating guidebook in the Northwest. Bob sees this not as the end of a dream, but as the foundation for a new beginning. "The more I learn, the more there is to learn," Bob says. "From Olympia north, the coast is changing, and it's a full-time job to keep up. Add to that the history, the plant and animal life, the oceanography and geology, the cultures, politics, and economics of this huge and varied land, and I can spend the rest of my useful life consumed with learning about new things and reporting them to my readers.
"And to do it, I must spend weeks -- months -- on the boat, cruising some of the most beautiful waters in the world. I'm a contented man."
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-- End --
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