Top 10 Stories of 2014: Part I

Two words define 2014 in the high-performance powerboat world: tragedy and triumph. On the tragedy side, we lost Steve Tripp, the founder of Revolution Performance Marine; Mike Fiore of Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats; Carey Downs of the original Pier 57 Marine; and super-fan Reese Lewis. The human losses in our small community were such that we simply stopped asking, “What’s next?” for fear we’d find out.

While we’ll never forget these people, we won’t relive their tragedies here. At some point, you have to try to start healing. So Jason Johnson, my co-contributor to offshoreonly.com and partner in daily news site speedonthewater.com, have chosen not to include these horrible losses in our respective “Top 10 Stories of 2014” roundups.

What follows are my picks from the more than 1,000 stories—many of which I wrote—from speedonthewater.com this year. To come up with this list, I based my selections on news value from a journalistic perspective. Any number of qualities, from the obvious (major accomplishment) to the subtle (trend or significant movement), in a story determines its news value, but it’s not an exact science. But traffic to a given story, a much less subjective measure, was another metric we used to compile our lists.

Read More: Top 10 Stories of 2014—Part I

Editor’s Note: For a visual tour of 2014, check out the “Year In Pictures” feature in the November/December issue of Speed On The Water digital magazine. Click here to download the magazine now at now charge.

Photo courtesy/copyright Tim Sharkey/Sharkey Images